Full Text of Rebecca MacKinnon's Speech at WPFC's Andersen-Ottaway Lecture
MacKinnon delivering her WPFC lecture (WPFC photo)
Internet press freedom expert Rebecca MacKinnon delivered this year's World Press Freedom Committee's Andersen-Ottaway Lecture on Global Communications Issues at the National Press Press Club in Washington, USA.
She tackled one of today's most pressing issues, China's stranglehold on free access to the Internet and how that totalitarian regime uses the Internet to perpetuate itself and to export its repressing ways.
Her lecture is titled "Can Authoritarianism Survive the Internet?". You may be able to answer this crucial question after reading the text of her lecture, which follows. You can also download MacKinnon's PowerPoint presentation.
UPDATE: Rebecca has posted a recording of her lecture on her blog.
A month ago many of us celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the run-up to the celebrations a German cultural organization set up this website called the “Berlin Twitter Wall”. Anybody with a twitter account could post comments to the wall by tagging their “tweets” in a certain way. The idea was to collect thoughts and reminiscences about the Fall of the Soviet Bloc 20 years ago.
But within a few days of the site going up, an unexpected thing happened. It was over-run by Chinese people protesting another wall - the “great firewall of China”as China’s system of Internet censorship has come to be known.
This is what the great firewall looks like in real life. You try to visit a banned website like Human Rights Watch, and you get this kind of error message in your browser. Thousands of websites are blocked in China in this way. But would Chinese authoritarianism crumble away if this great firewall ceased to exist?
In considering the answer to this question, we need to understand that authoritarianism has evolved since 1989. And China is “exhibit A” for how authoritarianism evolves and adapts to the Internet age.
Unlike people in the former Soviet Bloc in the late 80’s, the Chinese people aren’t pining for consumer goods they can’t access. Thanks to market reforms and to the Internet, the state has a lot less control over what Chinese people choose to do with their lives.
As far as youth culture is concerned, the Chinese government is increasingly irrelevant. An example is these college kids - who became famous as the “Back Dorm Boys” after they posted this video from their dorm onto YouTube. The Internet made them famous. They now have lucrative contracts as entertainers. Their careers are made. Without help or hindrance from any Chinese authorities, one way or the other.
The Internet is even enabling many ordinary Chinese citizens to speak truth to power. Here’s one example. As is common practice, some county-level officials joined a government trade mission to Africa —which was basically a tourism junket. But their tourist videos somehow got posted onto the Internet, sparking outrage by ordinary Chinese Internet users about the waste of their taxpayer money.
Deng Yujiao was a waitress in Hubei who stabbed a drunken government official in self defense after he made inappropriate and physically forceful sexual advances. She was tried for murder. But due to the public outcry on the Internet, her sentence was downgraded to intentional assault and the judge allowed her to walk free on the grounds that she had been temporarily insane. And the surviving officials who had accompanied the attacker ended up being disciplined.
Public exposure of this kind is causing officials at least in some parts of China —especially the more Internet-connected parts— to modify their behavior lest their careers be ruined.
Because of the Internet, some provincial governments like Guangdong province in Southern China next to Hong Kong, authorities are getting pro-active. They are holding “netizen forums.” At one that took place in October, one of the participants proudly posted this photo on his website, basically bragging that the government found him important enough to invite him to such an event.
Prominent bloggers and Internet commentators were invited for a dialogue with officials to discuss a range of social issues that tend to be hot topics online in the province. The idea is to impress upon bloggers that they have a responsibility to uphold stability, and that while their views and input on the governance process is valued they also have a responsibility to make sure things don’t get out of hand.
The National government now also deems it necessary to engage with citizens on the Internet. Last spring Premier Wen Jiabao held a live webchat with “netizens” for more than two hours, answering all kinds of questions, including some about corruption.
So what’s going on here? Chinese cyber-glasnost? Not so fast. Wang Xiaofeng, a blogger known for his often politically edgy commentary, wrote a rather cynical blog post in reaction to the Premier’s web chat. He complained that all the fanfare and excitement about the Chinese government’s “Internet democracy” was so much hogwash. All the government is doing, he said, is using the Internet to interact with people on an emotional level. Without formal political structures for participation and legal rights protection none of this means much.
Not long after he wrote this post, the company that hosts his website asked him to shut the site down for a while, due to complaints they were getting from authorities.
And while it’s possible to use the Internet to become a famous popstar or poet in China these days —or to start a business and get rich— if you try to use the Internet to organize a political opposition movement you’ll find yourself in jail. As people like Liu Xiaobo, Huang Qi, Tan Zuoren and Hu Jia have all experienced.
So while the Internet has brought a lot more discourse and contention to Chinese society, the government has still managed to prevent the Internet from being used as a tool to organize a 1989-style democracy movement - or an Eastern European style velvet revolution.
But most Chinese bloggers are not lying awake at night worrying whether the police are going to bust down the door. The censorship system —in effect— protects people from themselves, by deleting or preventing publication of writings that cross over the line.
Here is what happened when I logged into one Chinese blog-hosting service, called Tianya, and tried to post something about the mothers of people killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
When I clicked on the “publish” button, I got this error message telling me my post is being held for moderation. It never appears. For most bloggers, that’s a warning you’ve crossed the line, and you know better than to try to write about that subject if you want to stay out of trouble.
This kind of censorship —preventing content from being published or deleting it from the Internet completely soon after a user publishes it— is done not by Internet police. Most of it is done by private sector employees of Internet companies.
This image comes from a government awards ceremony early last month where managers of various Chinese Internet companies received “self discipline awards” for having done such a good job at policing their social networking services and keeping off content the government deems “un-harmonious”
This is all thanks to a legal situation which the lawyers in this room will recognize: INTERMEDIARY LIABILITY. Internet service providers, web hosing companies, social networking services, and anybody who hosts user-generated content is held legally liable for everything their users do. Therefore they have to devote considerable overhead to hiring entire departments of employees to monitor and censor their customers.
A lot of Western companies are lobbying lawmakers in Western democracies for greater intermediary liability of Internet service providers and social networks in order to fight copyright violation, and some family protection groups want more intermediary liability in order to fight criminals. But China serves as a warning to all of us for where things can end up if we’re not careful.
Chinese public opinion is increasingly shaped not just by censorship but by pro-active efforts at “spin”. This is a meeting of volunteers from the Communist Youth League and elsewhere, whose role it is to steer online conversations in a certain direction. Other people are paid per posting, and are nicknamed the “fifty cent party.”
And while censorship and spin make it tough for liberal reformist voices to get much traction or presence on the Chinese Internet, young nationalists are encouraged and supported by the government. One example is this website, called Anti-CNN, set up by a group of patriotic college graduates in the spring of 2008 to discredit foreign media coverage of China. The site is quite popular and this summer after the riots in Xinjiang it played a role in discrediting foreign media and the Uighur exile movement in the eyes of most urban, ethnic Han Chinese.
The news environment in China is very different than it was when I was a reporter there in the 90s. Back then if a riot happened in a third-tier city I would likely hear about it weeks later from an exiled group that heard about it second hand. Now eyewitnesses or participants immediately post photos from their cameraphones to the Internet. So now the government has changed its strategy. When something bad happens the state news agency usually reports on it fairly quickly, but giving the government’s version of what happened. Unofficial accounts are scrubbed from the blogs and social networks as much as possible, while the Chinese search engines turn up ample coverage of the event from the government’s perspective.
What is emerging in China is a new form of networked, Internet enabled authoritarianism, which I’ve started to call “cyber-tarianism.” It’s a more participatory kind of authoritarianism in which leaders like President Hu Jintao actually make straight-faced statements about the importance of using the Internet to connect with public opinion.
A Singapore-based academic named Yongnian Zheng says this is an example of what political scientists call “authoritarian deliberation.” It’s based on the idea that an authoritarian state can actually have a lot of give and take with its citizenry —especially in the Internet age— but show no signs of democratic reform when it comes to multiparty elections, separation of powers, rule of law, things like that.
I took these photos in 2005 at the World Summit for the Information Society —a U.N. organized meeting held in Tunisia to discuss the future of global Internet governance. One could do a whole talk just on that, but we’ll leave that for another place and time.
Technology companies from all over the world took the opportunity to set up booths and promote their products. The Chinese networking companies Huawei and ZTE had bigger booths than Cisco, Sun Microsystems, or any other U.S. companies. And unlike the US company booths that were just promotional exhibits, the Chinese booths were set up with meeting rooms, to do business.
African and Middle Eastern delegations were lining up all day to talk to Huawei
and ZTE representatives. The Chinese model of networked authoritarianism is important to Chinese technology businesses as they aggressively expanding their business around the world.
Why should an African dictatorship want to pay for Chinese companies to wire up their citizens to broadband and mobile networks? Isn’t that suicidal? Not if you follow the Chinese example. China points the way for how it’s possible to hook up your economy to the global network and still maintain one-party rule.
But aspects of the Chinese example aren’t only attractive to dictatorships. When the Chinese government issued an edict in June that all computers sold in China had to come pre-installed with censorship software, the global computer industry fought back so hard the edict was withdrawn.
But interestingly, some Western child protection groups thought green dam sounded great. The co-founder of one UK-based anti-porn group, Mediamarch, told a journalist in June: “All computers should be provided with net-filtering software loaded —and the default position for such filters should be on.” Her view might be on the extreme end of things, but the point is that in Western societies there is a great deal of political pressure to censor —and to hold Internet companies liable for policing their users in order to more effectively protect children, protect copyright, and fight criminals and terrorists. All well and good, say civil liberties groups, but what about due process, accountability, transparency, and rule
of law?
In the digital age, Western societies are fighting bitterly over how to balance security and liberty. The problem is we propose solutions to the many social ills that are amplified by the Internet within the context of our own socio-political environment. But how are those solutions impacting free expression more globally?
How are these solutions playing out, and how are they ALREADY playing out when adopted as “best practice” by cybertarian regimes?
When we criticize countries like China for lack of rule of law and due process our moral authority is rather weakened when they respond by saying, as they often do: “we’re only doing the same thing that the Department Homeland Security gets to do under the PATRIOT ACT.”
The Internet and the global telecommunications system is a globally interconnected layer. In developed countries we now depend upon the Internet to conduct the details of pretty much all aspects of our lives, including our political activities.
But how do we ensure that this layer is a transparent medium between citizen and government, and not an opaque extension of incumbent power, as it has already become in places like China?
Several international organizations, fora and bodies have formed over the past decade or so to coordinate and discuss Internet policy. The structure and geopolitics of organizations like ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum would require a whole separate talk which I don’t have time for here.
But what I’ve observed as I’ve been attending some of these meetings around the world is that governments of democracies and dictatorships alike are seeing very much eye to eye on questions of how technology should be regulated and standardized in order to facilitate law enforcement, child protection, and intellectual property enforcement.
There is a reluctance to tackle the difficult question of how free expression should also be preserved within the network, beyond generalized lip service. Because practical discussions on how to preserve free expression and human rights on the network requires making value judgments about what specific countries and companies are doing, which disturbs the harmony and good feeling of such fora and might lead to some governments walking out and withdrawing their support from these processes altogether.
This picture here is from a plenary session of the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt last month. As it so happens U.N. Undersecretary General Sha Zhukang who presided over the forum used to be chief arms control negotiator in the 1990s. I used to interview him frequently.
At this year’s IGF two things happened that showed how difficult it is to tackle specific free expression problems at such meetings. U.N. security removed a poster promoting a book by the Open Net Initiative, which mentioned Chinese Internet censorship practices. And on the final plenary panel about emerging issues for governing social networking platforms, I was told specifically by organizers beforehand that I must not mention specific U.N. member countries in my remarks about human rights issues that arise in the regulation of social networks.
On the other hand, Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak was invited to give a special keynote address promoting her “Cyber Peace Initiative”, aimed at keeping young people safe online and promoting good digital citizenship for the next generation. European and North American family safety groups praised her work and several, including the U.S.-based Family Online Safety Institute signed cooperation agreements with the Egyptian government.
Egypt actually has the biggest blogosphere in the Arabic-speaking world. It also stands next to only China in the number of bloggers who have been threatened or arrested. If you’re a young Internet user in Egypt you’re only safe if you don’t criticize Mubarak’s regime or try to expose its abuses. But at the Internet Governance Forum this was not pointed out in any of the panels.
So where is the world going from here? We Americans, especially, are inclined to assume that thanks to some magical combination of capitalism, the Internet, and Twitter, authoritarian countries will all eventually evolve in the democratic direction. But can we be so sure? Might we all meet in the middle?
In closing, I return to last month’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Standing atop the Brandenburg Gate last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reminded us that November 9th also marks a much darker anniversary, Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against Jews in 1938. It’s a reminder, she pointed out, that protecting civil liberties and human rights requires constant vigilance and hard work.
This hard work is not just about supporting activists on the other side of various kinds of walls —concrete or virtual. The future of freedom in the Internet age will also depend on our constant vigilance over what we are doing, and potentially enabling, right here at home.
Thank you.
But within a few days of the site going up, an unexpected thing happened. It was over-run by Chinese people protesting another wall - the “great firewall of China”as China’s system of Internet censorship has come to be known.
This is what the great firewall looks like in real life. You try to visit a banned website like Human Rights Watch, and you get this kind of error message in your browser. Thousands of websites are blocked in China in this way. But would Chinese authoritarianism crumble away if this great firewall ceased to exist?
In considering the answer to this question, we need to understand that authoritarianism has evolved since 1989. And China is “exhibit A” for how authoritarianism evolves and adapts to the Internet age.
Unlike people in the former Soviet Bloc in the late 80’s, the Chinese people aren’t pining for consumer goods they can’t access. Thanks to market reforms and to the Internet, the state has a lot less control over what Chinese people choose to do with their lives.
As far as youth culture is concerned, the Chinese government is increasingly irrelevant. An example is these college kids - who became famous as the “Back Dorm Boys” after they posted this video from their dorm onto YouTube. The Internet made them famous. They now have lucrative contracts as entertainers. Their careers are made. Without help or hindrance from any Chinese authorities, one way or the other.
The Internet is even enabling many ordinary Chinese citizens to speak truth to power. Here’s one example. As is common practice, some county-level officials joined a government trade mission to Africa —which was basically a tourism junket. But their tourist videos somehow got posted onto the Internet, sparking outrage by ordinary Chinese Internet users about the waste of their taxpayer money.
Deng Yujiao was a waitress in Hubei who stabbed a drunken government official in self defense after he made inappropriate and physically forceful sexual advances. She was tried for murder. But due to the public outcry on the Internet, her sentence was downgraded to intentional assault and the judge allowed her to walk free on the grounds that she had been temporarily insane. And the surviving officials who had accompanied the attacker ended up being disciplined.
Public exposure of this kind is causing officials at least in some parts of China —especially the more Internet-connected parts— to modify their behavior lest their careers be ruined.
Because of the Internet, some provincial governments like Guangdong province in Southern China next to Hong Kong, authorities are getting pro-active. They are holding “netizen forums.” At one that took place in October, one of the participants proudly posted this photo on his website, basically bragging that the government found him important enough to invite him to such an event.
Prominent bloggers and Internet commentators were invited for a dialogue with officials to discuss a range of social issues that tend to be hot topics online in the province. The idea is to impress upon bloggers that they have a responsibility to uphold stability, and that while their views and input on the governance process is valued they also have a responsibility to make sure things don’t get out of hand.
The National government now also deems it necessary to engage with citizens on the Internet. Last spring Premier Wen Jiabao held a live webchat with “netizens” for more than two hours, answering all kinds of questions, including some about corruption.
So what’s going on here? Chinese cyber-glasnost? Not so fast. Wang Xiaofeng, a blogger known for his often politically edgy commentary, wrote a rather cynical blog post in reaction to the Premier’s web chat. He complained that all the fanfare and excitement about the Chinese government’s “Internet democracy” was so much hogwash. All the government is doing, he said, is using the Internet to interact with people on an emotional level. Without formal political structures for participation and legal rights protection none of this means much.
Not long after he wrote this post, the company that hosts his website asked him to shut the site down for a while, due to complaints they were getting from authorities.
And while it’s possible to use the Internet to become a famous popstar or poet in China these days —or to start a business and get rich— if you try to use the Internet to organize a political opposition movement you’ll find yourself in jail. As people like Liu Xiaobo, Huang Qi, Tan Zuoren and Hu Jia have all experienced.
So while the Internet has brought a lot more discourse and contention to Chinese society, the government has still managed to prevent the Internet from being used as a tool to organize a 1989-style democracy movement - or an Eastern European style velvet revolution.
But most Chinese bloggers are not lying awake at night worrying whether the police are going to bust down the door. The censorship system —in effect— protects people from themselves, by deleting or preventing publication of writings that cross over the line.
Here is what happened when I logged into one Chinese blog-hosting service, called Tianya, and tried to post something about the mothers of people killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
When I clicked on the “publish” button, I got this error message telling me my post is being held for moderation. It never appears. For most bloggers, that’s a warning you’ve crossed the line, and you know better than to try to write about that subject if you want to stay out of trouble.
This kind of censorship —preventing content from being published or deleting it from the Internet completely soon after a user publishes it— is done not by Internet police. Most of it is done by private sector employees of Internet companies.
This image comes from a government awards ceremony early last month where managers of various Chinese Internet companies received “self discipline awards” for having done such a good job at policing their social networking services and keeping off content the government deems “un-harmonious”
This is all thanks to a legal situation which the lawyers in this room will recognize: INTERMEDIARY LIABILITY. Internet service providers, web hosing companies, social networking services, and anybody who hosts user-generated content is held legally liable for everything their users do. Therefore they have to devote considerable overhead to hiring entire departments of employees to monitor and censor their customers.
A lot of Western companies are lobbying lawmakers in Western democracies for greater intermediary liability of Internet service providers and social networks in order to fight copyright violation, and some family protection groups want more intermediary liability in order to fight criminals. But China serves as a warning to all of us for where things can end up if we’re not careful.
Chinese public opinion is increasingly shaped not just by censorship but by pro-active efforts at “spin”. This is a meeting of volunteers from the Communist Youth League and elsewhere, whose role it is to steer online conversations in a certain direction. Other people are paid per posting, and are nicknamed the “fifty cent party.”
And while censorship and spin make it tough for liberal reformist voices to get much traction or presence on the Chinese Internet, young nationalists are encouraged and supported by the government. One example is this website, called Anti-CNN, set up by a group of patriotic college graduates in the spring of 2008 to discredit foreign media coverage of China. The site is quite popular and this summer after the riots in Xinjiang it played a role in discrediting foreign media and the Uighur exile movement in the eyes of most urban, ethnic Han Chinese.
The news environment in China is very different than it was when I was a reporter there in the 90s. Back then if a riot happened in a third-tier city I would likely hear about it weeks later from an exiled group that heard about it second hand. Now eyewitnesses or participants immediately post photos from their cameraphones to the Internet. So now the government has changed its strategy. When something bad happens the state news agency usually reports on it fairly quickly, but giving the government’s version of what happened. Unofficial accounts are scrubbed from the blogs and social networks as much as possible, while the Chinese search engines turn up ample coverage of the event from the government’s perspective.
What is emerging in China is a new form of networked, Internet enabled authoritarianism, which I’ve started to call “cyber-tarianism.” It’s a more participatory kind of authoritarianism in which leaders like President Hu Jintao actually make straight-faced statements about the importance of using the Internet to connect with public opinion.
A Singapore-based academic named Yongnian Zheng says this is an example of what political scientists call “authoritarian deliberation.” It’s based on the idea that an authoritarian state can actually have a lot of give and take with its citizenry —especially in the Internet age— but show no signs of democratic reform when it comes to multiparty elections, separation of powers, rule of law, things like that.
I took these photos in 2005 at the World Summit for the Information Society —a U.N. organized meeting held in Tunisia to discuss the future of global Internet governance. One could do a whole talk just on that, but we’ll leave that for another place and time.
Technology companies from all over the world took the opportunity to set up booths and promote their products. The Chinese networking companies Huawei and ZTE had bigger booths than Cisco, Sun Microsystems, or any other U.S. companies. And unlike the US company booths that were just promotional exhibits, the Chinese booths were set up with meeting rooms, to do business.
African and Middle Eastern delegations were lining up all day to talk to Huawei
and ZTE representatives. The Chinese model of networked authoritarianism is important to Chinese technology businesses as they aggressively expanding their business around the world.
Why should an African dictatorship want to pay for Chinese companies to wire up their citizens to broadband and mobile networks? Isn’t that suicidal? Not if you follow the Chinese example. China points the way for how it’s possible to hook up your economy to the global network and still maintain one-party rule.
But aspects of the Chinese example aren’t only attractive to dictatorships. When the Chinese government issued an edict in June that all computers sold in China had to come pre-installed with censorship software, the global computer industry fought back so hard the edict was withdrawn.
But interestingly, some Western child protection groups thought green dam sounded great. The co-founder of one UK-based anti-porn group, Mediamarch, told a journalist in June: “All computers should be provided with net-filtering software loaded —and the default position for such filters should be on.” Her view might be on the extreme end of things, but the point is that in Western societies there is a great deal of political pressure to censor —and to hold Internet companies liable for policing their users in order to more effectively protect children, protect copyright, and fight criminals and terrorists. All well and good, say civil liberties groups, but what about due process, accountability, transparency, and rule
of law?
In the digital age, Western societies are fighting bitterly over how to balance security and liberty. The problem is we propose solutions to the many social ills that are amplified by the Internet within the context of our own socio-political environment. But how are those solutions impacting free expression more globally?
How are these solutions playing out, and how are they ALREADY playing out when adopted as “best practice” by cybertarian regimes?
When we criticize countries like China for lack of rule of law and due process our moral authority is rather weakened when they respond by saying, as they often do: “we’re only doing the same thing that the Department Homeland Security gets to do under the PATRIOT ACT.”
The Internet and the global telecommunications system is a globally interconnected layer. In developed countries we now depend upon the Internet to conduct the details of pretty much all aspects of our lives, including our political activities.
But how do we ensure that this layer is a transparent medium between citizen and government, and not an opaque extension of incumbent power, as it has already become in places like China?
Several international organizations, fora and bodies have formed over the past decade or so to coordinate and discuss Internet policy. The structure and geopolitics of organizations like ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum would require a whole separate talk which I don’t have time for here.
But what I’ve observed as I’ve been attending some of these meetings around the world is that governments of democracies and dictatorships alike are seeing very much eye to eye on questions of how technology should be regulated and standardized in order to facilitate law enforcement, child protection, and intellectual property enforcement.
There is a reluctance to tackle the difficult question of how free expression should also be preserved within the network, beyond generalized lip service. Because practical discussions on how to preserve free expression and human rights on the network requires making value judgments about what specific countries and companies are doing, which disturbs the harmony and good feeling of such fora and might lead to some governments walking out and withdrawing their support from these processes altogether.
This picture here is from a plenary session of the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt last month. As it so happens U.N. Undersecretary General Sha Zhukang who presided over the forum used to be chief arms control negotiator in the 1990s. I used to interview him frequently.
At this year’s IGF two things happened that showed how difficult it is to tackle specific free expression problems at such meetings. U.N. security removed a poster promoting a book by the Open Net Initiative, which mentioned Chinese Internet censorship practices. And on the final plenary panel about emerging issues for governing social networking platforms, I was told specifically by organizers beforehand that I must not mention specific U.N. member countries in my remarks about human rights issues that arise in the regulation of social networks.
On the other hand, Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak was invited to give a special keynote address promoting her “Cyber Peace Initiative”, aimed at keeping young people safe online and promoting good digital citizenship for the next generation. European and North American family safety groups praised her work and several, including the U.S.-based Family Online Safety Institute signed cooperation agreements with the Egyptian government.
Egypt actually has the biggest blogosphere in the Arabic-speaking world. It also stands next to only China in the number of bloggers who have been threatened or arrested. If you’re a young Internet user in Egypt you’re only safe if you don’t criticize Mubarak’s regime or try to expose its abuses. But at the Internet Governance Forum this was not pointed out in any of the panels.
So where is the world going from here? We Americans, especially, are inclined to assume that thanks to some magical combination of capitalism, the Internet, and Twitter, authoritarian countries will all eventually evolve in the democratic direction. But can we be so sure? Might we all meet in the middle?
In closing, I return to last month’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Standing atop the Brandenburg Gate last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reminded us that November 9th also marks a much darker anniversary, Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against Jews in 1938. It’s a reminder, she pointed out, that protecting civil liberties and human rights requires constant vigilance and hard work.
This hard work is not just about supporting activists on the other side of various kinds of walls —concrete or virtual. The future of freedom in the Internet age will also depend on our constant vigilance over what we are doing, and potentially enabling, right here at home.
Thank you.
Print
Lovely speech as always from Rebecca. Maybe next time take a better picture of the internet queen?
Posted by: Justin Trauben | December 12, 2009 at 09:04 PM
We empathize with you regarding governments in general, Rebecca.
With so many people with so many differing opinions, either you have a government that does not allow them to be expressed OR a government that allows them and then uses them against the individual BECAUSE of the power of a free government to access just about anything in the name of national security.
In effect, we help the government put down the most rebellious of us by expressing the ideas we have publicly.
We like to think of ourselves as free in America. And, frankly, America probably is the best place in the world to live right now.
But, there are hundreds of thousands of people in one uniform or another in the US who are only too happy to restrict a person's movements and ideas.
Thomas Lincoln (Abe's father) had a very easy way of remaining free. He would build a cabin and then look out over the valley. When he saw the smoke of someone else's cabin, he would simply move on, and build another cabin.
Land was free, and Thomas didn't want to deal with anyone else's problems.
Now, if we see smoke, it's probably a riot downtown.
Our groins have caught up with us. With the millions of people, all with individual pride and opinions, governments have no choice but to arrest folks for crossing the street in an improper manner.
We did it to ourselves. And, we keep on doing it. Seems like every other person is pregnant.
Hey, we love babies too. But, as with the Tribbles in Star Trek, we just seem to need to produce too many. People go to clinics desperately trying to add another person to traffic jams.
As a result, true freedom is a thing of the past unless one wishes to build one's cabin in Antarctica.
If we attempted to be free like Thomas Lincoln was free, we would have the FBI surrounding our cabin before we could say Jackie Robinson.
Posted by: Gaston and Marie | December 14, 2009 at 06:09 PM