[House Hearing, 112 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
PROMOTING GLOBAL INTERNET FREEDOM
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH,
AND HUMAN RIGHTS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 8, 2011
__________
Serial No. 112-114
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
71-621 WASHINGTON : 2012
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
DAN BURTON, Indiana GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ELTON GALLEGLY, California ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American
DANA ROHRABACHER, California Samoa
DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California BRAD SHERMAN, California
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
RON PAUL, Texas GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
MIKE PENCE, Indiana RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
JOE WILSON, South Carolina ALBIO SIRES, New Jersey
CONNIE MACK, Florida GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska THEODORE E. DEUTCH, Florida
MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas DENNIS CARDOZA, California
TED POE, Texas BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky
GUS M. BILIRAKIS, Florida BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio ALLYSON SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania
BILL JOHNSON, Ohio CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
DAVID RIVERA, Florida FREDERICA WILSON, Florida
MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania KAREN BASS, California
TIM GRIFFIN, Arkansas WILLIAM KEATING, Massachusetts
TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania DAVID CICILLINE, Rhode Island
JEFF DUNCAN, South Carolina
ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York
RENEE ELLMERS, North Carolina
ROBERT TURNER, New YorkAs
of October 5, 2011 deg.
Yleem D.S. Poblete, Staff Director
Richard J. Kessler, Democratic Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
TOM MARINO, Pennsylvania KAREN BASS, California
ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri
ROBERT TURNER, New York
October 11, 2011
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
WITNESSES
Daniel Calingaert, Ph.D., vice president, Freedom House.......... 6
Ms. Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director, Reporters Without
Borders........................................................ 17
Ms. Elisa Massimino, president and chief executive officer, Human
Rights First................................................... 27
Ms. Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz fellow, The New
America Foundation............................................. 41
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
Daniel Calingaert, Ph.D.: Prepared statement..................... 9
Ms. Clothilde Le Coz: Prepared statement......................... 19
Ms. Elisa Massimino: Prepared statement.......................... 31
Ms. Rebecca MacKinnon: Prepared statement........................ 43
APPENDIX
Hearing notice................................................... 74
Hearing minutes.................................................. 75
The Honorable Russ Carnahan, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Missouri: Prepared statement...................... 76
Written responses received from Freedom House to questions
submitted for the record by the Honorable Russ Carnahan........ 77
Daniel Calingaert, Ph.D.: Exerpt from report submitted for the
record......................................................... 81
PROMOTING GLOBAL INTERNET FREEDOM
----------
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health,
and Human Rights
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:45 p.m., in
room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher H.
Smith (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. Smith. The subcommittee will come to order. I want to,
first of all, express my apologies to our witnesses and all
interested parties for the delay. We did have a series of votes
that precluded gaveling this to order at the proper time of
2:00, so I ask for your forbearance.
Good afternoon and welcome to this hearing on global online
freedom. About 2 billion people in the world regularly
communicate or get information on the Internet. Well over half
a billion people do so in repressive countries. As Internet use
has become vital and even the standard means to disseminate
beliefs, ideas, and opinions, so we see a growing number of
countries that censor or conduct surveillance on the Internet
in conflict with internationally recognized human rights, laws,
and standards.
In 2006, I held the first major hearing ever on Internet
freedom, right here in this room in response to Yahoo! turning
over the personally identifying information of its email
account holder Shi Tao to the Chinese Government, who tracked
him down and sentenced him to 10 years for sending abroad
emails that revealed the details of Chinese Government press
controls. At that hearing Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco
testified on what we might ruefully call their worst practices
of cooperation with the Internet police of totalitarian
governments like China's.
That same week, I introduced the first Global Online
Freedom Act as a means to help Internet users in repressive
states. In 2008, the Global Online Freedom Act was passed by
three House committees.
In the last dozen years, the Internet, in many countries,
has been transformed from a freedom plaza to big brother's best
friend. The technologies to track, monitor, block, filter,
trace, remove, attack, hack, and remotely take over Internet
activity, content, and users has exploded. Many of these
technologies are made in the United States. Many of them have
important and legitimate law enforcement applications, but
sadly, many of them are also being exported every day to some
of the most unsavory governments in the world whose use of them
is far from legitimate. Every day we learn that more activists
are being arrested for the use of newly developed
technologies--much of it American technology--in China,
Belarus, Egypt, Syria, and many other countries around the
world. The stakes are life and death for online democracy
activists, and they deserve our support and protection.
For example, Belarus is blocking social networking sites
like Twitter and Facebook and aggressively shutting down
opposition Internet sites. Kazakhstan, which already blocks a
number of popular blogs and media sites, is also in the process
of creating a ``national Internet'' where all domestic domain
names will have to operate on physical servers within its
borders. Syria is using sophisticated tools to limit the
ability of the opposition to organize, and to track down
peaceful protestors.
China has created the Great Firewall and wants to create
its own sanitized version of the Internet that will essentially
isolate China from much of what is happening in the rest of the
world, and when protests break out, it simply shuts down the
Internet, as it did in Tibet and Xinjiang in recent years.
In Vietnam, Facebook has been blocked for 2 years, and
under a new executive decree, a number of bloggers and
journalists who write for independent online publications have
been arrested. Egypt continues to detain blogger Alaa Abd El-
Fattah for his online criticism of the Egyptian army, and today
we have just learned that in addition to its already extensive
online censorship in Iran, the U.S. virtual embassy in Iran has
been blocked after only 1 day of operation.
Today, I introduced a bill, along with Congressman Frank
Wolf and some other Members of the House, a bill that responds
to the growing use of the Internet as a tool of repression and
to changes in technologies of repression. The new Global Online
Freedom Act of 2011, H.R. 3605, fundamentally updates
legislation I first introduced in 2006 and which in 2008, as I
mentioned before, advanced through three House committees.
The new GOFA requires the State Department to beef up its
reporting on Internet freedom in the annual Country Reports on
Human Rights Practices and to identify, by name, Internet-
restricting countries. This country designation will be useful
not only in the diplomatic context, in helping to advance
Internet freedom through naming and shaming countries, but will
also provide U.S. technology companies with the information
they need in deciding how to engage in repressive foreign
countries.
Second, the bill requires Internet companies listed on U.S.
stock exchanges to disclose to the Securities and Exchange
Commission how they conduct their human rights due diligence,
including with regard to the collection and sharing of
personally identifiable information with repressive countries
and the steps they take to notify users when they remove
content or block access to content. This provision of the bill
will help democratic activists and human rights defenders hold
Internet companies accountable by creating a new, heretofore
unrealized, transparency standard for Internet companies. This
provision will also require foreign Internet service companies
that are listed here in the U.S. to report this information as
well. This will include big Chinese companies such as Baidu,
Sohu, and Sina.
Finally, in response to many reports that we have all seen
in the papers recently of U.S. technology being used to track
down or conduct surveillance of activists through the Internet
or mobile devices, this bill will prohibit the export of
hardware or software that can be used for potentially illicit
activities such as surveillance, tracking, and blocking to the
governments of Internet-restricting countries. Current export
control laws do not take into account the human rights impact
of these exports, and therefore do not create any incentive
whatsoever for U.S. companies to evaluate their role in
assisting repressive regimes.
This section will not only help stop the sale of these
items to repressive governments, but will create an important
foreign policy stance to the United States that will help
ensure that dissidents abroad know that we are indeed on their
side and that U.S. businesses are not profiting from this
repression.
This export control law is long overdue and thoroughly
consistent with the approach Congress has taken, for example,
in restricting exports of certain crime control equipment to
China. It makes no sense for us to allow U.S. companies to sell
technologies of repression to dictators and then turn around
and have to spend millions of dollars to develop and deploy
circumvention tools and other technologies to help protect
dissidents from the very technologies that U.S. companies
exported to their persecutors.
Today's hearing is an important moment to take stock of
where we are and how we can move forward to promote and defend
Internet freedom around the world. What we do here in the
United States is critically important to achieving our goals.
We must send a strong message to companies; that they have a
unique role to play in preserving online freedom and send an
even stronger message to repressive governments that the
Internet must not become what it is today, so often a tool of
repression.
I would like to yield to my good friend and colleague, Mr.
Payne, for any opening comments.
Mr. Payne. Thank you very much, Chairman Smith, for calling
this very important and timely hearing that looks at the
promotion of Internet freedom around the world. I would also
like to thank our distinguished witnesses for agreeing to
testify here this afternoon.
For over 2 billion people worldwide, the Internet serves as
a daily source of news, a way to communicate with family and
friends, and a place to conduct business. It has become a
staple of our day-to-day lives around the world. For some, the
Internet serves as a venue to express one's religious or
political views, a right that we as Americans hold in the
highest regard. It is in this capacity that the Internet has
served as a tool for both freedom and repression.
Over the past year, we have witnessed what has been dubbed
the Arab Spring. In countries throughout the Arab world, via
the Internet and social networking, citizens have communicated,
organized, and raised awareness of their plight under
repressive regimes, oppressive regimes. Sites such as Facebook
and Twitter have played a major role in these uprisings,
offering the opportunity to spread ideas and organize events
with a large number of participants. In a March poll of
Egyptian and Tunisian Facebook users, 85 percent of the
respondents in both countries said that the primary use of
Facebook was to raise awareness amongst countrymen, inform the
global community or organize movements. Given that in the first
quarter of 2011 the number of Facebook users in the Arab world
increased by 30 percent, it is obvious the dramatic impact
Facebook is having on these movements.
It should be noted that Facebook and other social media
network sites still have a low penetration rate in these
regions. In Egypt, for example, Facebook is used by a mere 5.5
percent of the population. However, this still amounts to 6
million users. It may be the case that Facebook users organized
online and then grew protests through other means. I am
interested in hearing from our panelists their thoughts on this
issue.
Whether you view the Internet as a social networking site,
as an instigating factor or simply a tool, one thing is clear,
the long-suspected power of the Internet to bring about
political change has been confirmed, and that is very good. The
world watched as Egyptians took to the streets to demand a new
government. In what has been called the Facebook revolution, on
February 11th, citizens from all around the globe celebrated as
President Hosni Mubarak stepped down after 29 years of power.
In Yemen, one activist who worked to organize protests through
social media explained that the Internet served to break the
fear and the silence and that online he felt freer to express
his opinion. Just a few weeks ago Yemen's dictator of 33 years,
Ali Abullah Saleh resigned.
In other countries, the outcomes were bleaker or the
protest continues. The prevalence of uprisings have caused
governments to enact stricter policies against political
dissent and further restrict access to information in online
networking tools. Former President Clinton once said trying to
control the Internet would be like trying to nail Jell-O to the
wall. Unfortunately, there are repressive regimes around the
world that are attempting to do just that, and some with
relative success.
I recently visited Bahrain where reports surfaced that the
government deliberately blocked bloggers' sites and is
restricting its citizens from accessing Internet, access to
sites like Facebook, Yahoo!, YouTube, and Google Earth, yet
determined to share their stories, protestors and bloggers
still accessed the Internet.
In Syria, where there is limited freedom of the press, the
Syrian Government monitors Internet use very, very closely and
has detained civilians for expressing their opinions or
reporting information online. Yet activists are using an iPhone
application to disseminate news and information online about
their protests against Assad.
While the Internet and mobile technology have allowed the
voices of dissent to be heard even when governments attempt to
block them, there is no doubt that for authoritarian regimes,
the Internet has become the new platform for oppression.
In China, the government is aggressively censoring online
content to its 450 million users. According to the State
Department's 2010 Human Rights Report, an estimated 70 Chinese
civilians are currently in prison for the political statements
they wrote online. This is totally wrong. Through these
activities, China has managed to instill fear in users and
providers, leading to self-censorship, yet many brave bloggers
are continuing to share their stories online.
In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's aligned police forces arrested and
charged 46 people with treason for watching a video of Egypt
and Tunisia's protests this past February. I am confident that
everyone in this room condemns the action of China, ZANU-PF and
others in their attempt to restrict the spread of information
within their borders. We all support the notion of freedom of
speech and freedom of information. We strongly believe that it
is wrong to prosecute and incarcerate individuals for
expressing their political views. China and ZANU-PF undoubtedly
defy many of our Nation's principles and deny basic human
rights to its people in a number of areas.
However, as the United States seeks to promote these
democratic values throughout the world, we must be sure that
our initiatives do not hurt those who they are intended to
protect. So in dealing with these issues, it is important that
we maintain a level head and respond rationally. Our
conversation should be about asking the question: How can we
best serve the citizens of these countries? Once our course is
decided, and initiatives implented, we must continue to monitor
and evaluate the impact of our policies to ensure that they
have the intended impact.
In February, just days after President Mubarak resigned,
Secretary Clinton confirmed the U.S. commitment to a free and
open Internet. By the end of this year, through the Net Freedom
Task Force, the U.S. will have contributed $70 million in
projects to promote Internet freedom globally since 2008. This
does not include initiatives of the Broadcasting Board of
Governors, who have contributed $2 million a year over the past
decade, toward granting access to its Web site via proxy
servers.
I hope to learn how the U.S. can improve on its endeavor to
create an open and free Internet, and I am also interested in
hearing how information is being restricted in African
countries like Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. There have been reports
that China was providing hardware and technical assistance to
these governments in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia with the goal of
jamming political opposition radios and monitoring emails. I
look forward to hearing from our witnesses, and I thank you
again for your willingness to testify.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Payne. I would ask unanimous
consent that all witnesses' testimonies be accepted, and
complete written testimonies be included in the record, and any
extraneous material they would like to affix to their
testimonies. Without objection, so ordered. I would also,
without objection, would ask that the full biographies of each
of our distinguished witnesses be included in the record, the
very rich and varied backgrounds, great academic
accomplishments, but because I want to get right to the
testimony, I will give a very short introduction.
Beginning first with Dr. Daniel Calingaert who oversees
Freedom House's contributions to policy debate on democracy and
human rights issues and public outreach. He previously
supervised Freedom House's civil society and media programs
worldwide. Dr. Calingaert contributes frequently to policy and
media discussions on democracy issues, including Internet
freedom and authoritarian regimes. Prior to joining Freedom
House, Dr. Calingaert was associate director of American
University's Center for Democracy and Election Management and
associate director of the Commission of Federal Election
Reform.
We will then hear from Ms. Clothilde Le Coz, who is the
Washington director for Reporters Without Borders, where she
works to promote press freedom and free speech around the
world. Previously she was in charge of Reporters Without
Borders Internet Freedom Desk and focused on China, Iran,
Egypt, and Thailand. She also updated the organization's
handbook for bloggers and cyber dissidents published in 2005.
Her role is now to raise awareness of the constant threats that
journalists are subjected to in many countries.
Then we welcome back to the committee a woman who has been
here many times, Ms. Elisa Massimino, who has been the
president since 2008 and chief executive officer of Human
Rights First, one of the Nation's leading human rights advocacy
organizations. Ms. Massimino helped establish the
organization's Washington office in 1991 and served as the
Washington director from 1997 to 2008. She is a national
authority on human rights law and policy, has testified, as I
indicated, dozens of times, and has published frequently. In
2008, the Washington newspaper, The Hill, named Ms. Massimino
one of the top 20 public advocates in the entire country.
Then we will hear from Ms. Rebecca MacKinnon, who is again
welcomed back to the committee to speak so authoritatively on
this subject, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation
where she focuses on U.S. policies related to Internet, human
rights, and global Internet freedom. She is cofounder of Global
Voices Online, a global citizen media network and a founding
member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder
initiative to advance principles of freedom of expression and
privacy in the information and communications technology
sector. She is a former journalist for CNN in Beijing and
Tokyo. Her first book, ``Consent of the Networked,'' will be
published next month.
So, Dr. Calingaert, if you could begin your testimony. Just
let me--Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle, a member of the
subcommittee, has arrived. Do you have a statement?
Ms. Buerkle. Thank you, no, I will yield my time, but I
thank you for holding this very important hearing.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Ms. Buerkle.
STATEMENT OF DANIEL CALINGAERT, PH.D., VICE PRESIDENT, FREEDOM
HOUSE
Mr. Calingaert. Mr. Chairman, honorable members, thank you
very much for the opportunity to testify today. Authoritarian
regimes have imposed extensive restrictions on Internet
freedom. These restrictions are well documented in Freedom
House's report, ``Freedom on the Net,'' and by others. I would
ask that this Freedom in the Net report be entered into the
record.
Mr. Smith. Without objection, so ordered.
Mr. Calingaert. I would like to focus on the use of Western
technology to restrict the Internet and on the U.S.
Government's response. Almost every regime affected by the Arab
Spring has used U.S. or European technology to suppress pro-
democracy movements. Over the past several months investigative
reports by Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, and
analysis by the OpenNet Initiative have documented a number of
cases. Boeing subsidiary Narus sold monitoring technology to
Telecom Egypt, NetApp software was part of a surveillance
system installed in Syria, technology from Blue Coat Systems
ended up in Syria. Blue Coat sold technologies to Bahrain,
Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. There were also important
European cases, British company Gamma provided technology to
Egypt's Interior Ministry under former President Mubarak to
record Skype conversations. A French firm, Bull, installed a
sophisticated Internet monitoring center in Libya while Colonel
Ghadafi was in power, an Italian company, Area, installed an
Internet surveillance system in Syria.
The list goes on, and you can get the full list in my
written testimony. But these are just the reported cases of
U.S. and European technology that has ended up in the hands of
Arab governments that restrict the Internet. There probably are
many more. When these companies were asked by news reporters
who their clients are, they usually refused to answer.
Advanced technology for monitoring online data and
communications attracts a great deal of interest overseas. A
conference that brought together buyers and sellers of this
technology this year in Dubai nicknamed the Wiretappers Ball
had about 1,300 people in attendance. The Middle Eastern
governments that have acquired Western technology for Internet
censorship or surveillance have abysmal human rights records.
Of the countries I have listed before, all but one were rated
not free by Freedom House for calendar year 2010. Two of them
were among the worst of the worst.
Western technologies are working directly at cross-purposes
with U.S. Government policy to promote Internet freedom. The
U.S. Government is supporting efforts to circumvent Internet
censorship at the same time as Western technology is making
that censorship more robust, and the U.S. Government is funding
programs to train human rights and pro-democracy activists in
digital security while U.S. and European companies are selling
surveillance software that puts those very same activists at
greater risk.
I give credit to the administration for the good work it
has done on Internet freedom, but in dealing with the specific
challenge of U.S. technology exports, the administration,
frankly, has dropped the ball. The administration's approach to
this challenge can be summed up in one line from Secretary
Clinton's speech in February on Internet rights and wrongs. She
said that businesses have to choose whether and how to enter
markets where Internet freedom is limited. In essence, she is
telling U.S. businesses to just do the right thing, but U.S.
businesses continue to sell surveillance and censorship
technologies to some of the worst abusers of human rights.
Stronger action is needed. The Global Online Freedom Act is
very much needed to stop the complicity of U.S. companies in
suppressing Internet freedom. A key provision of GOFA is to
prohibit exports of surveillance and censorship technology to
countries that restrict the Internet. During recent protests in
Cairo, angry Egyptian demonstrators held up U.S.-made tear gas
canisters as a sign that the United States was still supporting
their oppressors.
Similarly, the use of U.S. technology by repressive regimes
to track down democracy advocates who are then imprisoned and
tortured is a blemish on America's image and a blow to U.S.
credibility. GOFA would also promote transparency by requiring
U.S. technology companies to disclose how they block online
content and collect and share personal data. This requirement
would make the companies more accountable to their users and
encourage U.S. companies to push back on requests to
collaborate with Internet censorship and surveillance. The
trade provisions of GOFA merit strong support as well. They
would push the U.S. Trade Representative to challenge Internet
censorship more forcefully and stand up for U.S. companies that
are adversely affected. Trade negotiations offer an effective
way to promote the free flow of information.
The U.S. Government and European governments have launched
significant initiatives to protect online freedom, but these
initiatives by themselves cannot keep pace with the growing
Internet restrictions imposed by repressive regimes. Stronger
actions are needed to stem the decline in global Internet
freedom and to enable hundreds of millions of Internet users
around the world to exercise their fundamental rights online.
Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Dr. Calingaert, thank you very much for your
testimony and for your recommendations and for the insights and
counsel you have provided to us as we shape this legislation.
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Mr. Smith. Next, Ms. Le Coz, if you could present your
testimony.
STATEMENT OF MS. CLOTHILDE LE COZ, WASHINGTON DIRECTOR,
REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS
Ms. Le Coz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank
the subcommittee for organizing this very timely hearing as
well as you, Mr. Chairman, for your commitment to promote
global Internet freedom. For the past 4 years, I have been
working on that topic, and this is a great opportunity to
reiterate how online freedom is bound to the fundamental right
to freedom of expression, but also to insist on the fact that
human rights cannot be isolated from the other political and
economic issues at play, and we welcome the new GOFA in that
sense.
The years 2010 and 2011 firmly established the role of
social networks and the Internet as mobilization and news
transmission tools. The Arab Spring and the echoes it had in
Asia and Latin America made it clear that the Internet on
computers and mobile phones was a very powerful tool of
expression and witness. But unfortunately, it also made it very
clear that what could be said and published could also be
censored and attacked.
Since the beginning of 2011, online censorship and
restrictions are actually more important than before in some of
the countries. For example, China did add the keyword
``Jasmine'' to their blacklist, as they even did with the word
``occupy.'' Vietnam reinforced the sanctions against bloggers
and reporters' activities, and the authorities even threatened
two netizens with possible imprisonment after they urged
Vietnamese to follow the example of pro-democracy demonstrators
in the Middle East.
But China and Vietnam are definitely not the only ones
following this trend, and what we witnessed today in Egypt, for
example, can be compared to the Mubarak era methods. Alaa Abd
El-Fattah and Maikel Nabil Sanad, certainly two of the most
prominent bloggers, have been arrested simply for expressing
their views, and they are still in jail, and in Syria, the
Internet slows down every Friday when the main weekly
demonstration takes place.
Promoting global Internet freedom is first and foremost
being able to link this issue to trade because there is a
criminal cooperation between Western high tech companies and
authoritarian regimes. According to Reporters Without Borders,
more than 120 netizens are behind bars simply because of what
they wrote online, and at least a dozen European and American
companies have helped their government to put them in jail.
According to files released by WikiLeaks in partnership
with five news media outlets last week, more than 160 companies
are actually involved. The surveillance tools sold by these
companies are used all over the world by armed forces,
intelligence agencies, and democratic and repressive
governments. Any computer or mobile phone can be physically
located.
The United States took the lead, the main lead, in
promoting online Internet freedom together by making clear that
companies have a responsibility and should have a
responsibility when selling their technologies abroad, and the
United States should continue to do so, but American actions
abroad cannot be relevant if the United States are not applying
domestically what they are promoting internationally, and in
the past year, however, one major issue has been of concern for
online freedom in the U.S. Recently two bills were introduced
that, if passed, would prevent the American citizens to benefit
from this freedom. Aimed at fighting criminal behavior, which
we obviously agree on, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the
Protect IP Act would have serious implications for
international civil and human rights.
Some provisions are actually instituting DNS filtering and
making it possible for Web services to take deliberate actions
to prevent the possibility of infringement from taking place on
their sites. That means that wrongly accused Web sites could
therefore directly suffer from this action. And DNS filtering
very much contributes to the Great Firewall that prevents
Chinese citizens to access free information. Therefore, in
order to promote global Internet freedom, our organization is
asking today the U.S. Congress to reject the Stop Online Piracy
Act and the Protect IP Act, but mostly to adopt effective
measures to prevent the export of technology, equipment, and
software to countries where they are likely to be used to
violate freedom of expression and human rights, and this is
what we think the new GOFA will help, and also to encourage
companies, U.S. companies to ensure that the equipment supplied
to a permitted country is not subsequently transferred to one
that it is not.
Reporters Without Borders would also like the U.S. Congress
to encourage other countries, not only the U.S., but other
countries to do so because this is one of the ways it could
really be effective.
And, lastly, is also asking not to keep human rights and
online freedom on the site when talking about trade. This is
exactly what we think GOFA will help to do, and last October,
China's restriction on the Internet have led to the U.S.
ambassador to the World Trade Organization to complain about
China's firewall on the grounds that it was violating WTO
rules. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Le Coz, thank you so very, very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Le Coz follows:]
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Mr. Smith. Ms. Massimino.
STATEMENT OF MS. ELISA MASSIMINO, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
OFFICER, HUMAN RIGHTS FIRST
Ms. Massimino. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you to the subcommittee for convening this important
hearing. I want to say a special thanks to you, Mr. Chairman,
for your leadership on this and so many other human rights
issues. You have really helped to elevate this issue of
Internet freedom on the U.S. foreign policy agenda, and we are
very grateful to you for your leadership.
Nearly 2 years ago when Secretary Clinton declared the
freedom to connect as a fifth freedom, she cited it as an
essential avenue for the exercise of fundamental human rights
and said governments should not prevent people from connecting
to the Internet, to Web sites, or to each other, and while she
noted that these technologies are value neutral, the United
States has a strong interest in ensuring a single Internet
where all of humanity, she said, has equal access to knowledge
and ideas. The world's information structure will become what
we and others make of it, she said.
Well, today, we know that repressive states across the
globe have made the Internet a dangerous place for those
seeking freedom and more representative government. You, Mr.
Chairman, framed the challenge that we confront today very well
when you said how will all these dictatorships ever matriculate
into democracy if the dissenters are all in prison, hunted down
with high tech capabilities sold or acquired through U.S.-
listed companies? And that is what we are here to talk about
today, the role of companies.
You know, today in her speech, Secretary Clinton said that
businesses have to ask themselves these questions, what should
you do in a country with a history of violations of Internet
freedom? How can you prevent post-purchase modifications when
you sell to authoritarian regimes? Companies have to ask these
questions, she said. Well, what we know now is that companies
not only have to ask these questions, but they have to give
informed and correct answers that reflect their own obligations
to respect human rights, and so we are grateful to be able to
focus today on the role of companies.
We have three primary points to make today, our
observations. One, that threats to Internet freedom are
proliferating, which you have already heard and know well, but
that few companies have policies to address those threats; two,
that the United States has an interest in ensuring that
companies make the right decisions when confronted with foreign
governments' demands to limit Internet services or capture
private user information; and, three, stronger U.S. Government
pressure, including action from the Congress is necessary to
promote improved corporate policies to address the threats to
Internet freedom.
I am not going to go into detail about the proliferation of
threats to Internet freedom, you know them very well, and you
have just heard them from the previous two witnesses, so I will
move right ahead to what I would like to, what we are grappling
with really at Human Rights First in working with companies who
are operating in this space. Many of them, particularly
surveillance and dual-use technology providers, when you press
them about their operations and what happens when their
products end up in repressive countries, tend to offer a few
excuses, and I think it is instructive to listen to those
excuses because they provide a road map for how corporate
thinking and behavior needs to change in order for companies to
become partners in protecting free information and digital
privacy.
So excuse number one, they say we comply with all
international and national laws, what we are doing is not
illegal. And at one level this is correct, obviously, but it
ignores the fact that businesses have an internationally
recognized responsibility to take concrete steps to protect
human rights. The U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human
Rights, which the U.N. Human Rights Council officially endorsed
this year, calls for businesses to perform due diligence, to
understand and avoid negative human rights impacts, that their
activities or the activities of their business partners will
have, and this standard is now reflected in the conflict
minerals provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act in Section 1502 as
well as in the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises
and the International Standards Organization's new ISO 26000,
guidance on social responsibility.
And the performance standards of the International Finance
Corporation. So these are not new things. There are standards
out there that businesses are or should be well aware of. So
for sellers of surveillance and dual-use technology or related
hardware, a minimum level of due diligence would have revealed
their role in the incidents that you just heard about and the
role that their products could play in enabling surveillance
and repression.
Excuse number two, they say, we sell to or partner with
private companies, not governments, so we can't be held
responsible for misuse of our product through a third party.
Now, the U.N. Guiding Principles recognize that companies may
be involved in human rights violations through their business
relationships with third parties. An important way to protect
against becoming a third-party enabler to human rights
violations is to ensure that all partners in the business chain
adopt policies that are consistent with the responsibility of
American companies to respect human rights, so hardware
companies should not sell products that could be used to
violate rights to a ``private'' company operating in a
repressive state if a reasonable amount of due diligence would
show that the buyer is willing to make its technology available
to government operatives. We have seen that happen time and
again.
Excuse number three. They say many democracies, including
the United States, have laws requiring that hardware permit
monitoring of communications or allowing surveillance of online
activity in order to facilitate law enforcement. The now multi-
billion dollar industry for surveillance technology was born 10
years ago out of the U.S. Government's desire for better high
tech tools for combating terrorism. Now we recognize that
governments have an obligation to provide for security and that
there are legitimate law enforcement purposes to which this
technology could be put, but companies need to be sensitive to
the differences in context between largely democratic and
repressive or authoritarian governments. The U.S. Government
certainly can step over the line sometimes, but we have a
robust, though imperfect legal and political system that can be
used to curb abuses that repressive governments do not have.
That means that surveillance technology in the repressive
governments hence is more likely to be used in ways to violate
human rights regardless of the permissible use of that
technology for law enforcement purposes here in the United
States. Companies need to take this into account in their
decision-making, and democratic governments like the United
States need to support companies to make the right decisions
through appropriate export procedures and controls.
Excuse number four. The technology that we bring into
undemocratic countries is a force for good that over time
outweighs the human rights violations that the technology
facilitates. We hear this all the time. And of course, it is
undeniable that increasing the availability of technology for
citizens of repressive regimes has incredible benefits for the
free flow of information, for free expression, and the ability
to organize and inspire others, as Mr. Payne pointed out.
However, such technology is, as we are talking about today, a
double-edged sword.
We recognize that the situations in these countries are
complex and that the best course of action for a business is
not always clear. But the first step is to ensure that American
businesses do not go into these complex situations blind. If
businesses gather as much information as possible regarding the
society, the government, and the legal structure of the country
in which they intend to operate and form a specific and
comprehensive plan for dealing with the objectionable demands
that government might make, they will be in a much better
position not just to ask the right questions, but to give the
right answers and make the right business decisions that will
protect privacy and free expression.
Excuse number five. Repressive regimes are going to get
this technology no matter what. If it is not from us, then it
will be from a company that is based in a country with fewer
restrictions. We have heard this from some countries--from some
companies, and certainly in other sectors we have heard it. But
in other sectors of the economy, the U.S. has never based its
trade relationships on this race-to-the-bottom approach, and
right now, Americans have leverage since this technology was
largely developed by U.S. companies and European partners. The
U.S. is in a strong position working with European allies to
establish new rules to guide these transactions.
The Internet service providers also offer similar excuses,
and we have similar answers to them, and I want to say that the
way, I think the way forward from this, to close this gap
between obligations and actual practice, there are two very
important pieces which I discuss in the written testimony, and
I won't go into them in detail, but one is Global Network
Initiative, which you have heard about and you will hear more
about, and I hope that we will talk about in the question-and-
answer period, but the other really is GOFA, the legislative
angle.
We are very concerned that there is a lack of pressure from
the government side to help companies understand what their
obligations are and to not have them navigating these dangerous
waters alone. And so we applaud your efforts to push forward
with this legislation, and we hope to work together with you.
We have a number of ideas that we talk about in the written
statement to strengthen the legislation. We know that threats
to Internet freedom today come from many places, and they come
in many forms. The Obama administration has articulated quite
admirably a clear policy in support of Internet freedom and has
made important early progress in elaborating strategy and
coordinating amongst U.S. agencies and with our allies, and the
GNI is also making important progress in raising awareness of
the issue among companies and in promoting wider engagement,
but we know from daily press reports that the threat to
Internet freedom requires a more concerted and comprehensive
response from governments and the private sector. The Global
Online Freedom Act addresses an important and continuing gap in
existing efforts. As one of our human rights colleagues from
Belarus said last year in a meeting with President Obama, ``For
you it is simply information, but for us, a free Internet is
life.'' Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Massimino, thank you very much for your
testimony and your recommendations as well as providing those
very useful excuses that are trotted out so routinely and then
giving a very cogent response to each of them.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Massimino follows:]
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Mr. Smith. Ms. MacKinnon.
STATEMENT OF MS. REBECCA MACKINNON, BERNARD L. SCHWARTZ FELLOW,
THE NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION
Ms. MacKinnon. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
Ranking Member Payne for the opportunity to testify today and
for your leadership on this issue. I look forward to answering
your questions after our opening statements.
In my testimony today, I am going to touch upon the lessons
learned from the Arab Spring, and particularly the role of
companies in suppressing dissent in the Middle East and North
Africa as well as in China and elsewhere. More details can be
found in my written testimony. I will then conclude with
recommendations.
After Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in
February, Google executive and Facebook activist Wael Ghonim
famously declared, ``If you want to liberate a society, just
give them the Internet.'' Sadly, events since then, as detailed
by previous testimony here today, have proven that Internet
access alone is insufficient in the face of aggressive
surveillance, cyber attacks, and brutal physical reprisals
against cyber dissidents.
In the Internet age, citizens' ability to organize, express
dissent, and conduct political discourse depends increasingly
on technologies that are created and often operated by
companies. The unholy alliance of unaccountable government and
unaccountable and amoral business is thus one of the most
insidious threats to democracy everywhere. As I explain in my
written testimony and have described in previous hearings,
China is the most extreme example of how the public-private
partnership in digital repression can work, but variants and
permutations of such partnerships are exclusive neither to
China nor to entirely authoritarian regimes.
I, therefore, recommend the following: First, we need to
improve and update export control laws, make collaboration with
repression more difficult, require companies selling
surveillance technologies overseas to conduct due diligence
about the context in which these products are likely to be used
and the human rights implications, require transparency in what
is sold to whom and where it is used, with reporting
requirements for companies as well as for U.S. Government
agencies approving sales and exports. Export laws should also
be revised and updated so that activists in countries like
Syria are not denied access to communication tools by Internet
companies fearful of violating sanctions.
Second, we need to require corporate accountability and
transparency in all markets. Companies should be required to
report on how they gather and retain user information, how they
share that information with governments, as well as the volume
and nature of requests made by governments to delete or block
user content or hand over user information. Mandating greater
accountability and transparency on the part of corporations as
well as on the part of governments about their access to
corporate data and the demands they are making, and about how
citizens communications are censored or monitored can promote
consumer awareness and stimulate demand for services that
people can associate with respect for their rights and
stimulate lack of demand for companies that are not respecting
people's rights. Shareholders and investors must also be
properly informed about what they are supporting so that they
can make investment decisions based not only on financials, but
also on what kind of world these companies are helping to
create.
Third, the support of multi-stakeholder corporate
accountability and assessment efforts is important. All
information and communications technology companies must not
only accept human rights risks and responsibilities, which they
clearly hold, as we have heard today, they must conduct human
rights due diligence, but they must also be required to undergo
independent assessment to determine whether they are living up
to their claims. The Global Network Initiative's globally
applicable principles on free expression and privacy were
developed over several years in a multi-stakeholder process
involving not only companies but also human rights groups,
socially responsible investors, and academic experts. They are
supported by implementation guidelines and an accountability
framework that applies to all markets and can be adapted to a
range of business models, including hardware companies and
Internet service providers. Companies that choose not to engage
with the GNI should be required to submit to some other multi-
stakeholder assurance process of at least equal if not greater
rigor and independence.
And finally, we need to make sure that all U.S. legislation
is compatible with global Internet freedom. All bills involving
Internet regulation, from cyber security to copyright
protection, to other challenges the Internet has wrought should
undergo their own human rights assessments before introduction
to identify potential, unintended consequences for human
rights, free expression, and global Internet freedom. The Stop
Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, now before the House
and Senate, are examples of bills that would have benefited
greatly from human rights due diligence and due diligence about
their impact on global Internet freedom before seeking remedies
to address copyright infringement, which unfortunately would
inflict collateral damage on free expression by effectively
establishing a nationwide filtering system and blacklisting
system as well as legal liabilities for Internet companies that
would compel Web site owners to proactively monitor and censor
users in ways that are not unlike the ways in which Chinese
companies are required to monitor and censor.
In short, there is no silver bullet solution for Internet
freedom any more than there has ever been a silver bullet
solution for freedom in the physical world. As in the offline
world, protecting human rights in the digital realm requires
public awareness, vigilance, and constant involvement as well
as an ecosystem of industry, government, and concerned citizens
working together with a shared commitment to basic rights and
values. Thank you very much.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much for your very, very
extensive recommendations, past and present.
[The prepared statement of Ms. MacKinnon follows:]
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Mr. Smith. Let me ask, maybe start off with you and the
others who might want to speak to this, China, it would appear,
and I just chaired a hearing a couple days ago on Liu Xiaobo. A
year ago on Saturday, we had the sad and tragic situation of an
empty chair in Oslo where neither he, nor his wife, nor was
anyone else able to receive the Nobel Peace Prize that he so
richly earned by his advocacy for democracy in China. We know
that the Chinese Government has deployed huge resources, no one
knows the exact amount, but we know the consequence, to surveil
and to use every means of making as impenetrable as possible
the Chinese Great Firewall, and I know that a number of very
talented people, including some from the Falun Gong and other
very talented people who have been able to breach it have come
up with technologies that are very useful not just for China,
but elsewhere.
A couple questions. Has China turned the corner with its
own indigenous corporations, like Baidu and others? You know,
they were totally relying or very much relying on U.S. high
tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo! early
on, but have they now taken the baton and created their own
capabilities that parallel or even exceed those big corporate
giants? And do you believe that if we require a listing of
their due diligence efforts as being part of the U.S. stock
exchange, which the new Global Online Freedom Act would
require, would that be a helpful tool in knowing what, for
example, Baidu is actually doing from year to year?
Ms. MacKinnon. Thank you for those questions. In China
today, actually, a great deal of the censorship and
surveillance is not actually being conducted by the government.
It is being conducted by Chinese companies largely. Most
Chinese Internet users today, when it comes to social
networking sites, when it comes to search engines, are
primarily using Chinese services, and while Western hardware
providers are certainly doing a great deal of business in
China, Chinese companies such as Huawei, which is often called
the Chinese Cisco, and another company called ZTE are also
increasingly competing with Western products and are also
innovating in terms of standards in a range of ways, and so,
yes, China definitely no longer relies on Western technology to
run its Internet infrastructure or, I should say, no longer
needs to rely on it, and certainly when it comes to the Web,
the Web tools, social networking, and search engines, again,
that market is almost entirely domestic, and all of those
companies are required to monitor and censor users, and they
are doing it not with Internet police coming into their
offices, but they are employing their own employees to conduct
this censorship and monitoring, so the private sector is
actually subsidizing a lot of this control.
Speaking to your second question about reporting, I think
this is quite important for a number of reasons. The first
reason is that I think a lot of American investors who are
investing in these companies do not really understand what is
happening and do not have full information about the
relationship between the government and the private sector and
the Internet companies in China, and so requiring reporting in
that regard would enable investors to make more informed
decisions about what they really want to be supporting.
Furthermore, reporting requirements would help Chinese
people understand what is happening because, of course, most
Chinese Internet users actually don't realize the extent to
which these companies are censoring and manipulating and
monitoring them because they are living within the system
itself. They have been living with blinkers all their lives,
they are not aware of what it is like not to have blinkers. So
most definitely, greater knowledge, greater public awareness of
what companies are doing will help inform users of what the
alternatives are and what other possibilities might be.
Mr. Calingaert. If I might add, I think there is a serious
question of whether the Chinese companies that Rebecca
mentioned are benefiting from protectionism. There are
indications that the major American social media companies like
Facebook are often blocked in China, and that probably benefits
the Chinese companies commercially. There is a recent case
reported of an application for iPad called Flipboard which
aggregates news, and they launched recently in China and were
blocked because they were providing the kind of content that
the Chinese Government objects to, and there just happens to be
a Chinese clone for this kind of application, and, you know,
the reports are still being fleshed out, but there are
indications that the American company was told that the
Flipboard application, unless they started censoring, they
would essentially lose out that market share to a Chinese
company. So I think this, and especially the trade provisions
of the GOFA bill, will get at this kind of problem.
Ms. Massimino. I just want to echo that and say that I
think that the SEC reporting provision in the bill, it is one
of the most important provisions. I think that this is
incredibly important for all the reasons that you heard,
especially, I think, for transparency for investors. This is
going to be a key issue. I think that as much as the industry
has developed in China, the Chinese market is always going to
be a huge magnet. You combine that with the fact that this is a
business that is all about innovation. I think that it is going
to be, in an ongoing way, very, very important to make sure
that we are advising and requiring American companies or
anybody, any company that is listed in the American stock
exchanges to make these disclosures.
Ms. Le Coz. I also would like to add that asking Baidu and
other companies about what they are doing is also very timely.
It is not only necessary, it is now because last month, the
Chinese Government convened a meeting of the top 40 Chinese
companies, Internet companies and high tech companies, to adopt
new guidelines, so if there is a time where you can ask what
they actually are doing is now.
Mr. Smith. I appreciate that. Again, that is one of the
improvements to the bill that we did not have in the existing
or the preexisting proposals. On the export controls issue, if
you would briefly touch on that, you know, it seems to me that
even though a parallel industry has emerged in China, aided and
abetted by U.S. and other high tech companies in the West,
obviously the next advancement, the next capability, is always
right around the corner, and if people do find the means to
pierce the Chinese Great Firewall, if we are providing
surveillance and censoring capabilities that are the next
generation, it seems to me that it would be in our humanitarian
interest not to be exporting it. Would you agree with that? Is
that an important component here?
Because, obviously, they are still buying the next-
generation technology, software, hardware, from U.S.
corporations, and just as we wouldn't sell to their police
certain police equipment, I hope we wouldn't sell them
implements that could be used in torture, while certainly this
is an area that is being used grossly for repression.
Ms. Massimino. Yes, I can just start. But I think that is
incredibly important. This is Section 301 in the bill, it is
very important, and it is incredibly timely. There is an
obvious gap, we talked about it today, that companies are able
to say what we are doing is not illegal. We need to change
that.
I think another reason why that provision is important is
because so many of these companies really have not gotten their
heads around what it means to be responsible for the end use of
their products. And a provision like this will force companies
to ask those questions and to understand what it means to do
due diligence. In many of these companies what we have found is
they have just not yet realized the extent of their obligation.
And this is, I think, a very important way to do that. We have
asked these questions of companies, many of the companies that
you heard us talk about today, whose products have ended up in
the hands of repressive governments and about what they did to
protect against that. And the answers, I can share them with
you and your staff, are very revealing. Some of them had no
idea that they even had to think about this. Others thought
that a private company in the United States, private business
partner that you are selling to, is the same as a private
company in Iran, and others think that they have no obligation
at all to disclose what they do or who they do it with.
So I think this provision will go a long way to underscore
with companies the extent of their only obligation, and it will
prompt better due diligence in the future.
Mr. Smith. Before the others answer, your excuse number
four, that somehow this is a force for good, hopefully that
myth--and I think for some, it was a well meaning sense. Google
told us that when they testified here they thought the Internet
would be opened up. As you mentioned earlier, Ms. McKinnon, in
your quote that somehow there is something inevitable about the
Internet that will open up societies. No, not when it is in the
hands of a dictatorship. So I thought the force for good
argument, hopefully that could be laid aside a couple of years
ago, and certainly today, because it is being used maliciously.
Ms. Massimino. Absolutely. And you know we hear from
companies all the time that the real bad guys in this equation
are the governments. And of course, that is true. But
governments need tools in order to do the bad things that they
do, particularly now. And for companies to ignore the potential
for complicity in that chain of events I think is
irresponsible. And this bill will help companies understand
their responsibility in that chain.
Mr. Calingaert. I would like to add a couple points. I
think the approach that GOFA takes makes a lot of sense for a
field or an industry that is very rapidly changing and you
probably know all too well from having to update GOFA now for
the third time, that changes in technology have a big
implication for how you write the law.
By focusing on basically setting in place a system to
control exports, defining the kinds of export that you want to
prohibit, what exactly is damaging about the technology,
identifying the countries that should be on the list, and then
presumably the list of actual technologies and products can be
updated as you go ahead.
I also think it is important that with this bill, you try
to get ahead of the next scandal that is going to happen. I
mean, sadly, there were the reports of Cisco helping build the
Great Firewall of China and then afterwards policy makers
trying to figure out how to fix that problem. And then you had
the Yahoo! case, and you had Nokia Siemens selling surveillance
technology to Iran. And there is nothing out there to stop yet
another company doing who knows what. And so I think it is well
beyond time to get ahead of this problem and put in place the
system that is going to prevent the next abuse.
Ms. Le Coz. Reporters Without Borders was really pleased to
see that new provision, and we would like, actually, to
encourage you to reach out to the European Union once they
implement the European GOFA. That would be a way of being
effective worldwide. And not to not sanction any U.S. companies
who would like to do business abroad but who has to compete
with the European one who wouldn't have to face the same
challenges.
And still regarding that provision, what we would also
welcome is a way of asking companies to track down their
technologies because they might sell it to a country that is
not specifically repressive or not on the list, but it might
still be able to go there. So to actually have a means of
knowing where the technology is.
Ms. MacKinnon. Just to add on, I concur with pretty much
everything everyone said, but just to add a couple of points on
both the ``it is not our responsibility to know how the product
is used'' type of excuse, ``because we are not doing anything
illegal,'' and also the excuse that, ``well, we are a
transformative freedom-bringing technology anyway, and so those
little details don't matter so much because in the end
everybody is going to be freed by the Internet anyway,'' is
sort of the narrative you often get.
And what is quite funny is that this particular industry,
while claiming to be so much more advanced than anyone else,
any other industry, is actually a laggard compared to the
extractive industry. Oil and gas and mining companies have long
ago recognized that they cannot go it alone, that they need to
be held accountable to work with other stakeholders, to work
with human rights groups, to work with socially responsible
investors to figure out how to mitigate their human rights
risk. That industry, for the most part, they are not perfect--
but at least a lot of these companies have come to recognize
that they do indeed have human rights risks, that they need to
acknowledge them and they need be to held accountable to their
commitments, and they need help reaching their commitments.
Similarly, in the manufacturing and apparel industries on
labor standards, you also have companies recognizing, the old
tech companies, recognizing that they have human rights risks
and responsibilities that they need to work on and accepting
that they should be held accountable.
Yet for some reason the technology industry seems to have
an attitude, with only a very few exceptions, this kind of
holier than thou, we are so Messianic, that we are above having
to be held accountable or having to admit there is any downside
to what we are doing. And it is time for people to grow up.
Mr. Smith. Well put.
Mr. Payne.
Mr. Payne. Thank you very much. Let me thank all of you for
your testimony, and I couldn't agree with you more.
Some of these companies talk about the difficulty that it
is to monitor and so forth.
We had the same kind of notions that were expressed when
two different types of legislation came about as related to
Africa, the first being the blood diamonds legislation. People
said there was no way, you can't identify diamonds, and as you
may recall, in Sierra Leone, the diamonds were used by Charles
Taylor to fuel the civil war and so forth. But we were able to
get the Kimberley Process. It was strained. There was
opposition to it. There were people who said it couldn't be
done, but it is happening. It has got to improve, but it is
happening.
We have a second legislation that is working its way
through, the minerals bill, I forget the exact name, but it is
going to do the same thing in the Democratic Republic of Congo
and other areas where minerals, very valuable minerals, are
being used to fuel wars and that warlords are taking the
profits, not benefiting the standard of living for the people
in that country, very rich but one of the poorest for standard
of living in the world, and we are moving that process through.
So what do these Internet companies say? Is it impossible?
Or is it that they just simply don't want to take on that
socially responsible position?
Ms. Massimino. Well, I think, they say a number of things,
and I try to outline them in my testimony. These are the
excuses for why they can't be held accountable or they can't
know, and while I am sympathetic to the argument that companies
can't control everything, it doesn't follow from that that they
can't control anything.
And I think that is one of the things that we are
struggling with, with some of these companies.
Now, of course, there are going to be lots of factors
outside of companies' control and outside of the U.S.
Government's control, frankly. But that doesn't mean that we
can't significantly improve the performance and improve the
situation for people in these countries who are struggling to
advance freedom of expression and human rights in their own
societies.
Companies have to feel that they are being watched, their
performance is going to be evaluated and that, particularly
American companies, that we, as a country, stand for something
and a lot of what we are exporting to the world is the values
of our private industry. And those are important.
When we are able to do this, it can work. If you remember
the example of, and this gets us to the intellectual property
issue that you heard about before, when companies are made to
understand their role in repression and/or work with civil
society and governments to fix it, it can be fixed. Remember
what happened with Microsoft in Russia, where the intellectual
property in piracy enforcement action against pirated software
was being used by the Russian Government to crack down on
dissenters or a civil society that was critical of the
government. And Microsoft was complicit with that because it
was frankly just dealing with the law enforcement entities in
Russia the way they would with the law enforcement entities in
the United States, rather naively, I think, under the best
interpretation of their actions. But when made aware of that,
and when they realized that they were complicit in the
crackdown on dissent by the Russian Government, they changed.
And they put their know-how and their innovation and their good
thinking that they put into the development of their products
into fixing this problem and came up with a scheme working with
and speaking with civil society in Russia and here to
circumvent the Russian Government's misuse of intellectual
property enforcement and gave a blanket license to these groups
to use their software.
So it can be done, but requires a lot of vigilance on the
part of the U.S. Government and civil society and working
together, as Rebecca said, in these multi-stakeholder
initiatives to be able to surface these issues.
Mr. Payne. Thank you very much.
Ms. Le Coz you mentioned in your six or seven points at the
end of your testimony that we should encourage other companies,
especially members of the OECD, to adopt similar bills.
How has the effort been, and any of you might want to
participate in the answer if you have something to add, how has
the effort been? What has been the response from the European,
the OECD companies? We hear, as you know, American companies
say, we are at a disadvantage; we have the laws that, for
example, business laws that prohibit corruption, the Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act, for U.S. businesses that makes it
illegal to bribe countries and contracting and so forth.
European countries still have that provision. It is not
illegal, and up until recently, it was actually a tax
deductible item in Germany; it was just considered, just
reported, as a cost of doing business. But I wonder how are the
Europeans dealing with this, and has it come up? Has there been
a concerted effort? Has any country taken this issue on?
Ms. Le Coz. Yes. The European Union would like to implement
GOFA in Europe, but they are not as far as the United States
are. From when I just came to the Internet freedom desk for
Reporters Without Borders, we were a part of the negotiations
for what became the Global Network Initiative. You had European
companies that were in those negotiations. They ended up never
signing it, and when you were asking them why--and please, jump
in as we talk about it--but when we were asking them why, it
was, they didn't expect it to be that important.
It means that at the level of their own companies, they had
to hire and create something on human rights and business
practices, which, and in that sense, where you were saying
that, would the American companies say it is possible or
impossible? I would say that the American companies, they are a
lot more than what the Europeans have been so far.
There might also be a difference in the way they see it.
You try to prevent, and maybe in the European Union, we had the
sense that it had happen to react.
Mr. Calingaert. If I could add, the Foreign Minister of the
Netherlands has called for export controls, and also there was
a vote in the European Parliament in April to introduce export
controls on technology to monitor Internet use and mobile phone
use. In the European system, obviously, that kind of initiative
won't happen until the European Council approves. But I think
there is significant movement in a similar direction to GOFA.
And I would also note that much of the interest, I know
from discussions with Dutch, Swedish and other European
officials, they are very interested in this issue in large part
because of the Nokia Siemens case. It was really a disgrace
that two major European companies sold very sophisticated
monitoring technology to Iran which was used to clamp down on
dissidents after the 2009 election.
And these most recent reports of technology going to Syria
and what was sold to Libya under Ghadafi originated in Europe
as well. So I think this is a very salient issue. And there is
a real opportunity to coordinate with European policymakers so
that if and, hopefully, when export controls are introduced in
the U.S., there are similar controls introduced in Europe and
neither side's businesses will be disadvantaged.
Mr. Payne. Thank you. Let me just ask one more question.
As I indicated in Africa, we know about the Mugabe
government and what is happening in Ethiopia, and I just
wondered to what extent are African governments attempting to
monitor or control private digital expression, in particular to
exert political control over communications and how can
citizens more effectively counter state attempts to control
digital communications in these countries?
I don't know if any of you have focused in on Africa other
than the two countries that we cited. Yes.
Ms. MacKinnon. Just a few comments. Ethiopia definitely
filters the Internet. I think Zimbabwe less so, but it is
believed that there is a certain amount of monitoring going on
and other panelists may have other information.
But it is also true that a lot of countries in sub-Saharan
Africa are heavy customers of Chinese networking equipment,
Huawei and ZTE in particular. And it is difficult to get a lot
of details about the types of customization that goes on and so
on. But just given how the network is configured in China and
given some of the regimes that this equipment is sold to, we
can easily draw some conclusions.
Mr. Payne. Thank you.
Yes.
Mr. Calingaert. I just add briefly that the ``Freedom on
the Net'' report of Freedom House covered several African
countries, and Ethiopia was rated ``not free,'' among the worst
rated countries; Zimbabwe, ``partly free.'' And the reports
themselves have a lot more detail that could answer your
question.
Mr. Payne. Thank you.
Well, I think that we really need to start to come down and
push these technology companies, as you mentioned, to grow up
and to have a human rights component as a very important part.
There was a debate back 6, 7 years ago about whether
restricting the Internet was going to harm or help the emergent
countries. And at that time, being a former educator I felt
that well, the ability to have information unrestricted, or
information in general, if some is restricted, perhaps the
overall good outweighs; that is what the arguments were at that
time. And I was watching it from that point so-called balanced
approach type thing.
Certainly, it appears as if these corporations really are
putting human rights and other issues far behind. It is just
about doing business, about doing more business, and if some
people are harmed, well, then, that is I guess maybe the cost
of doing business.
And so I do think that we need to start looking at stronger
restrictions, and hopefully, it would be great if all these
companies would just say, we are going to do the right thing,
and then if a company wanted to do use any Internet, they would
have to comply to what all these companies say. It could be a
reverse way, where they say, well, none of us will go into,
say, China or go into Zimbabwe, period, close them right out,
and the country can't be left without it, so then if that
sparked the countries to say, well, maybe we need to relook at
ours; we can't be shut out; we can't be left out of this new
millennium, perhaps something like that, of course it is a
great dream, but something like that could put pressure on a
country to say, I guess we need to change or we are going to be
left behind big-time.
So maybe that notion could kind of be thrown out there at
some point.
Thank you all very much for your testimony.
Mr. Smith. Thank you Mr. Payne.
Let me just ask a few final questions and then if Mr. Payne
has any additional.
Ms. MacKinnon, as a board member of the Global Network
Initiative, you certainly have a ringside seat as to how well
or poorly voluntary corporate responsibility is playing out,
and I would note parenthetically, on the day we held the
hearing, the first hearing ever on global Internet freedom,
which led to the introduction of GOFA, the State Department
came and sat where you sat, and announced the task force, the
Global Internet Freedom Task Force, which to some extent took
the wind out of the sails of one of the first provisions of the
bill which was to create an office at the State Department. A
task force is not an office, but it certainly has capabilities,
and we welcomed it, I welcomed it, with open arms because it
was moving from nothing to something. But very often we see
this across the board on human rights issues, we are always
told, let the companies comply voluntarily--and some do you;
there is no doubt about that, some do step up to the plate.
I remember during the early years of my tenure in office in
the 1980s, I got elected in 1980 and took office in 1981, the
same argument was being employed to say, ``Let's not have
sanctions on South Africa,'' such arguments were being used on
a whole host of human rights issues with regards to Eastern
Europe, and it never worked, until you said, ``We are not
kidding.'' We even have some companies argue that there is a
competitive disadvantage to doing due diligence on human rights
when the competitor is not, so they don't want to go that
route, so the corporate board sits around and says, ``Let's
eschew that.''
So if you could speak to the Global Network Initiative, the
GNI, because it seems it has had time to prove itself. The
State Department finally, I don't think has stepped up to the
plate and said--and the Pentagon--that there are real security
implications that are underappreciated about what is happening
here, all this police capability that has been significantly
enhanced also has dual use for militaries that are deployed
elsewhere I would think. So if you could take a stab at that.
Ms. MacKinnon. Well, thanks very much. And just to
emphasize, I do agree that government pressure, Congressional
pressure and pressure from the executive is extremely
important. And without that pressure, it is difficult to
properly incentivize, let's say, companies to move in the right
direction. And GNI is certainly meant to be part of an
ecosystem of efforts, it is not meant to be the end all or be
all by any means.
I think as far as the success of the initiative, it is
still in the early days. Those who have been involved with some
of the other multi-stakeholder initiatives around extractives,
blood diamonds and manufacturing, will know that it takes
sometimes a few years for these initiatives to really prove
themselves, to gain membership and so on.
And the first round of assessments is currently underway.
The assessments, the independent assessments of the first three
companies to join, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, will be
completed early next year, and the results will then be
publicized. We will have a better sense by then of to what
extent membership in the Global Network Initiative has in fact
improved these companies' ability to address their
responsibilities and to avoid problems.
But it is definitely true there is a problem convincing
companies that they need to do this. And with a small staff and
a small membership, GNI cannot on its own convince companies
that they need to be held accountable and that they need to
make commitments. If consumers are not aware of what is going
on, if investors more largely are not aware of what is going on
and if there is insufficient government pressure, if there is
no kind of disincentive from other parts of the government,
then there is going to be a lot less reason that they are going
to feel like they should expend the effort.
I would also point out, too, that, and again, I agree that
well-crafted legislation is an essential part of the picture,
but there are also aspects because technology evolves so fast,
it is difficult to get too finely grained about each specific
company because every company, every technology is somewhat
different. Their technologies are changing very quickly. In
2006, when GOFA was first introduced we were mainly talking
about filtering, now we are talking about deletion and deep
packet inspections and surveillance, and the technology has
evolved a great deal, and so it is difficult to revise and
refine and change the legislation in a very finely grained way
so that companies don't then come up with this excuse, well, it
wasn't illegal, so we did it, because you didn't get around to
passing the law or changing the law.
And so one of the benefits of having companies make broad
commitments to free expression and privacy and then work with--
in a sufficiently robust multi-stakeholder initiative that
holds them to these commitments is that you can then have a
group of experts really looking at the very specifics of their
technology and the very specifics of how it is affecting users
from month to month and year to year as that changes very
rapidly and make sure that they are living up to the spirit
rather than just the letter.
And keeping companies connected with the spirit, I think,
requires more than just law. It requires an ecosystem of
efforts and an assurance and assessment process that is
independent and that has the involvement of human rights groups
and technical experts I think is also very important.
So it is very early days, GNI now has two new members, and
again, we will see how things evolve. There are discussions
with some other companies, not only in the United States. We
are optimistic that over the coming months, there may be more
members.
I think a growing number of companies are recognizing that
they do need help and are starting to think internally and have
conversations about how they get to the point where their
corporate culture is even capable of joining something like
GNI, but there are a number of companies who are starting to
move in that direction.
Ms. Massimino. Human Rights First also is a founding board
member of GNI, but we have also been involved in a number of
these other multi-stakeholder initiatives with private
companies. And I would encourage you, one of the reasons for
the GNI coming into existence was the perfect storm of
pressure, from both the Congress and the public about what
companies were doing and the human rights impacts of their
actions.
My concern now is that some of that pressure is waning, and
there is, as we go through the process, as Rebecca said about,
you know, implementation of the principles and assessment of
companies' performance, that there is a bit of a waning of
energy in terms of the urgency of commitment to that.
You know I think for us, the metrics for success for the
GNI or any other multi-stakeholder initiative like that is not
so much the number of company members, although that is
important, we want more companies to join, but we want them to
join for the right reasons. And I think it would be very
instructive and helpful actually if you and other leaders on
these issues in Congress were to keep an eye on the GNI and ask
us questions about how we are doing, perhaps even have a
briefing or a hearing about, once this initial assessment phase
is done. Transparency is so much the key to getting this issue
right. That is why the provisions of GOFA that require
reporting are so important. It is also the key to these private
multi-stakeholder initiatives working.
So I would ask you to encourage us in the GNI to be
forthcoming about that and ask us the hard questions.
Mr. Smith. We will invite you back on that.
Let me ask Ms. MacKinnon, with regards to the export of
China's capabilities, specifically by Chinese companies--and I
do think when we talk about China's private sector, it needs to
be in quotes because it certainly is heavily influenced if not
run by the government--but, are we seeing an exporting of
Chinese capabilities to other repressive regimes, like Belarus,
like Egypt, for example, or anywhere else?
Ms. MacKinnon. Certainly Chinese networking companies like
Huawei and ZTE, who I mentioned, are doing a lot of excellent
business in much of the world. Libya was a heavy customer of
Huawei's. We are finding out Iran is a strong customer of
theirs as well, and so certainly the capabilities of their
networking equipment and their willingness to service that
equipment in ways that suit those local governments' needs is
certainly helping those governments to filter and monitor their
networks.
But the problem is that we are finding actually the most
sophisticated surveillance technologies that are making their
ways in the Middle East and North Africa and also in other
places, these are actually coming from the West. And so this is
part of the problem, is that the highest tech surveillance
mechanisms are really coming from us.
Mr. Smith. Let me ask and maybe Dr. Calingaert, you might
want to answer, one of the provisions in our trafficking in
persons law heavily emphasizes naming and shaming, naming
countries--and there is obviously a follow up, once they are
named; when they are designated a Tier III, for example, they
can be very heavily sanctioned. We do the same thing with
Countries of Particular Concern for religious persecution
issues and religious freedom. And the first provision of our
Global Online Freedom Act is Internet restricting countries. I
have absolutely no doubt there will be pushback from the
administration, as there always is, no matter who is in the
White House, that they don't want to make such a call, but it
has been my experience, especially with trafficking, that when
a country is even on the Watch List but they are a Tier III, I
talk to them; Luis CdeBaca, Ambassador-at-Large for trafficking
issues, his office is deluged. Our local mission of the named
country is visited, a dialogue starts, and very often, that
country, through very real, concrete actions can get themselves
off of Tier III by taking action to try to combat to human
trafficking. Will that work here? Do you think it is a good
idea to have such a designation for countries that engage in
that?
Mr. Calingaert. Absolutely, and in some ways, it might work
better because with Freedom House's report, we already do this.
And it is an entire report looking specifically at the issues
of access, restrictions and other challenges to Internet
freedom.
If we are looking at the how it might apply, we use the
most simple summary of our results, put countries into three
categories, either ``free,'' ``partly free'' or ``not free.''
In terms of Internet freedom, our last report covered 37
countries; of those, 11 were rated ``not free.'' And by our
assessment, it is very clear that the restrictions on the
Internet in those countries are quite extensive.
The bigger challenge is what to do about the mid-range
countries. And there are several countries in the partly free
category where there are quite significant restrictions on
Internet freedom, but the interesting point is there is much
more freedom on the Internet than in the traditional media.
And, in fact, we use the same scale for our press freedom as we
do for Internet freedom, and it is precisely in this mid-range
where we see a big gap showing much more Internet freedom than
traditional press freedom.
That said, there are certain countries in that category
which we are very concerned about, including Malaysia and
Russia, and we are looking closely at the trends there because
we think the environment might get a lot more restrictive, and
especially Russia, after what has happened in recent days that
the Internet was instrumental in exposing a lot of the vote
fraud, I wouldn't be surprised if the Russian Government starts
to clamp down there.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Le Coz did mention denial of service in the
Russian context as well.
Ms. Le Coz. Yes. Last week, 15 Web sites were attacked in
Russia and right during the parliamentary election.
Mr. Smith. Including the chief monitoring Web site, isn't
that correct, for independent assessments of how free and fair
the election was?
Ms. Le Coz. Yes.
Mr. Smith. Let me ask just a few final questions. Corporate
responses to enabling repression can take either ignorance--and
we had that at the first hearing, I sensed that some whether
wittingly or unwittingly, some of the top people, some of the
brightest minds in Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo! kind of
were feeding an ignorance that somehow what they were doing,
``Gee us?'' Some of it might have been real. But there is also
the indifference, somebody could just be indifferent; they
don't care who gets hurt as long as they make money. But
recently the President, Jerry Lucas of the company that hosts
the Wiretappers' Ball, a surveillance industry trade show, told
the Washington Post that this technology is absolutely vital
for civilization. He told the Guardian that an open market
exists for the sale of technology and that you cannot stop the
flow of surveillance equipment. He suggested that it is
impossible to control this equipment.
An anonymous State Department official who attended the
Wiretappers' Ball in Maryland told the Washington Post that
``we have lost, if the technology people are selling at these
conferences gets into the hands of bad people, all we can do is
raise the costs; we can't completely protect activists or
anyone from this.''
Now that sounds to me more like surrender, and if we just
throw up our hands and say, no mas, we have lost the ability, I
think, to protect the best and the brightest in all of these
countries who just want to be free and have a democracy.
What is your sense when you hear that kind of statement
from the State Department and Jerry Lucas in his comments?
Ms. MacKinnon. If I may, well, Jerry Lucas is amoral, if
not immoral. Those types of statements are certainly
unacceptable.
I think, however, it is also important to point out that
the U.S. Government's relationship with many of these companies
is more as a client and an enthusiastic client than as a
regulator or putting any kind of pressure on them. I have heard
of no evidence that the several dozen U.S. agencies, State and
government agencies, as well as Federal that attended that
conference, have made any effort to use their pressure as major
clients and customers of these companies to ask questions about
whether these companies are actually adhering to human rights
norms, whether these technologies can be modified in ways that
go far beyond the way they ought to be used in a free and
democratic society.
And they are just going there to buy and find out all the
cool things they can do and are basically to some extent
complicit in this culture of secrecy and basically anything
goes, you just sell this to whoever wants it, and you have got
U.S. Government agency people in these meetings rubbing
shoulders with people from governments all over the world. And
it is basically a secret meeting. The press isn't allowed to
come. There are no requirements to report on what goes on
there.
And I think it is important that the U.S. Government take
the lead in adopting policies of greater transparency and
accountability about how these products are being used and the
U.S. Government's relationship with some of these companies
that we know are complicit in repression around the world.
And if I could add one further comment on the designation,
I think that the naming and shaming component definitely can be
quite effective or has been shown to be effective in other
kinds of human rights situations.
With the Internet, one thing we do need to be careful about
is how we use these designations, how we then, the requirements
we place around companies and countries that are either
designated or perhaps not designated or perhaps borderline so.
For instance, one, while there are some countries that might
quite obviously fall on the list, there are other countries,
such as India, where the Telecommunications Minister has just
recently demanded that Facebook and Google and other companies
censor political speech on the Internet that they feel is
critical of existing politicians. This is an example of why
reporting requirements need to be global, that companies need
to be transparent about the way and about the extent to which
they are handing over information to governments and the extent
to which they are being asked to take down content globally.
And I think a good model for this is Google's transparency
report where they are reporting on all of the markets where
they are doing business, on the number of takedown requests
they are receiving from governments, the number of requests for
user information they are receiving, and they are also
reporting on how many requests they actually responded to and
so on. And while, obviously, in genuinely unfree countries,
this provides very useful advocacy information for activists,
even in countries that might not perhaps make that list, such
as India, I know of activist organizations in India who have
taken information they have received from the Indian Government
about censorship policies and then compared it with Google's
transparency report, seeing massive discrepancies and are then
able to use this as an advocacy tool to push for greater
honesty on the part of their government.
So this is one example, I think, of why it is important
that the transparency and accountability reporting requirements
and disclosure requirements really do need to be global,
because there are a lot of countries where the abusive
technology can take a country that is decently democratic and
move it into a much more repressive direction. And you want
companies to be on the forefront of helping citizens prevent
that from happening in advance rather than waiting until it has
already turned into an Internet restricting country and then
you place requirements on companies doing business there.
So this is kind of one example, I think, of why global
transparency is really important.
And also, I think it is important that democracies take the
lead in saying, look, we believe that the relationship between
government and companies needs to be transparent and
accountable, and that citizens of democracies need to
understand what is going on, so that if there are abuses, those
can be addressed, and so that we can serve as an example for
other countries to follow.
So, again, this is why I feel that a lot of the
requirements are best off if they are truly global, even if
there is a designation list.
Mr. Smith. Yes.
Mr. Calingaert. I found it really shocking to even get that
quote published in the record that essentially some businesses
have the attitude of, we just sell this stuff.
We should really pay attention to what this stuff is. When
we are talking about spyware, it is software that has gone to
some of the worst, most oppressive regimes that we know
routinely track, monitor, harass, intimidate dissidents. We
know of cases in Bahrain, Iran, and elsewhere where activists
have been shown intercepted private communications when they
were being interrogated, and they were pressured through that
to turn in other activists, and some of these people were
tortured. So this is what some Western companies are complicit
in.
And sorry, comment on the administration's attitude, yeah,
they are throwing up their hands, and that is all the more
reason why Congressional leadership is needed on this issue.
Ms. Massimino. Just on that last point about the
administration's attitude. My own experience is that that
comment from an unnamed official, while it might express some
frustration, justifiably so, at what was going on at this
conference, doesn't really reflect the attitudes of the people
that I have seen working on these issues. I think if there is
one thing we know about this industry it is that it is
constantly innovating, and so what that means in the context of
repressive government and democracy human rights activists is
that this is a cat and mouse game, constantly changing. And we
have a side in that fight, you know, the United States stands
for something, and we are choosing sides, and American
companies need to be put to that choice as well.
But as soon as that technology gets in the hands of
repressive governments, we also have an obligation and
companies ought to put all of their energies and innovation
into creating a market to get around that threat to privacy and
free expression. And so whatever we can do and whatever the
Congress can do to encourage that kind of innovation and
transparency about business relationships, that will make sure
that the balance doesn't get tipped permanently to the side of
the repressive governments.
Ms. Le Coz. I want to add also, we were shocked to hear
that comment, and because we sell stuff, 2 years ago, because
people sold stuff, there is an American citizen, who is
originally from Thailand, who was interrogated on the U.S. soil
by Thai officials simply because of what he wrote online. It
happened here. So if you continue to sell stuff, this is
actually what people are exposed to and not only in China or
where actually these companies want to do business but don't
really want to know what the dissidents are becoming once the
technology is there, it can come here. It already did.
Mr. Smith. Before yielding to Mr. Payne, I have always
argued that for a dictatorship to prosper and to continue to
repress its own people, it needs at least two major components:
A very aggressive secret police that can use billy clubs and
whatever, to repress its people; and propaganda. It seems to me
that in a very real way this high tech complicity, again
wittingly or unwittingly, I think, at this point, I don't know,
just defies credulity.
We have a situation where, just like tasers are subjected
to export controls, this is a taser of high tech capability,
and the people who then get caught in its net, and that would
be the dissidents, the religious believers, the workers' rights
advocates, who, in China, as we all know, are rounded up--there
are no independent trade unions and yet if you try to form one
or initiate a wildcat strike or, say, you want to negotiate in
a collective bargaining, means forget it, you are going to
prison. And if you are on the Internet, they are going to find
you. So I just do think that tasering is an apt description
because at the end of the day, it is the people that we care so
much for, the democracy activists, the people who believe in
freedom, who are getting tasered by these by the secret police
courtesy of high tech companies here and abroad.
So we are going to push very hard.
I do believe, and maybe I'm wrong, but every single human
rights initiative that I have been a part of, including the
Trafficking in Persons initiative, the TVPA, Trafficking
Victims Protection Act, was strongly opposed by the
administration. In most cases, they came around at the end and
actually signed the bill, whoever it was in office, in that
case Bill Clinton. Their folks testified here that they didn't
want it. They wanted a couple of small tweakings but not the
naming and shaming, not the TIP report, all of those important
aspects as well, so I suspect we are going to have an uphill
battle here. But frankly, the stakes are so high now, not just
for China but for all of the other countries that now have
learned from China to use these repressive tools. It is a high
tech example of what was said infamously during the Soviet
years, the West will hang itself, and they will sell us the
rope, and high tech rope is certainly all of what you have so
brilliantly testified to today.
Mr. Payne.
Mr. Payne. I wonder, I heard you talk about what has
happened after the results of the Russian elections have come
out. Does anyone have any idea whether the Internet played a
significant role in the surprise that Putin had at the results
where he did not, I don't think, win an overwhelming majority--
I think it was almost less than 50 percent--but do we have any
intelligence to know whether the Internet was active there?
Ms. MacKinnon. I can speak to that. Global Voices Online,
the Web site that I cofounded, has a team of Russian bloggers
and Russian speakers who have been following the Internet there
very heavily. And most certainly, it seems that a lot of the
people who went out in to the streets did so because of online
mobilization, and that for many of them, it was their first
protest action ever, a lot of the people who got detained had
never even been at a protest before. And so definitely.
And there were also some Web sites that sort of had kits
for people, here is a flier that you can print out and stick up
around your neighborhood and so on. And people writing about
how, vote for anybody except United Russia. So definitely, both
in terms of the protests after the election over what some felt
were rigged results as well as the results themselves, it does
seem that the Internet played a role.
There were also very aggressive attacks against opposition
Web sites as well, and LiveJournal went down, which is kind of
one of the most popular blog hosting systems in Russia, and of
course, it is hard to pin exact responsibility on who launched
the attacks, but people are assuming that the attacks were from
people who didn't want the critics of the ruling party to speak
out and organize at that time.
Ms. Le Coz. I would like to add that it is specifically
because online political debate is really present in Russia
that Russia is one of the countries where you can find the most
propaganda online because they know it is taking place there,
during elections, but also before and after.
And this is a place for political debate. LiveJournal, one
of the most popular Web sites goes down every time there is
something happening; 15 others that are critical of the actual
political situation went down, too. And this is because it is
happening there that you have all those attacks.
Mr. Payne. Has anyone been monitoring the, in that region,
the Ukraine and Belarus? Has there been any, to your knowledge,
attack on the Internet or trying to shut it down? Both of those
countries are going through some changes right now.
Mr. Calingaert. Well, there are actually--Belarus is fairly
sophisticated. And in the aftermath of their last Presidential
election, where there was significant reports of voter fraud
and then protests, and the state-owned Internet service
provider was basically redirecting traffic away from opposition
Web sites and had created clones, which looked pretty much
exactly the same as the original ones, but they had
misinformation on them, so they give the wrong place and time
of the protests. So there is quite extensive manipulation of
the Internet in Belarus and quite sophisticated.
Mr. Payne. Well, let me--I also, a statement by the U.S.
Government official, I think in a lot of instances sometimes,
and I'm not in defense of them because I don't even know who
was there, but the government tends to be outmanned it seems in
a lot of instances. You will have some staff people there, and
you have got the world there with their half-million-dollar
lawyers and $200,000 salesmen, and so they overwhelm the,
usually, the people there that are supposed to be representing
State or the interests of good people. And so, however, I agree
that we can't throw in the towel. You can't quit. You have to
realize what is happening.
And as we are moving in this, and it is not going to get
any better, because as you know, with our debt, and the two
things that are going on--there is a move to even reduce the
size of government, so we are going to even have less
capability of doing things of this nature when we are getting
down to cutting $4 trillion, $5 trillion, $6 trillion over the
next 10, 15 years, so the reality is that we are going to have
a difficult time if the trend in, at least in the House,
continues, so there are going to be some real barriers.
And finally, there is a strong move against regulations.
There is another philosophy that regulations stymy growth and
we are stagnant in our Nation because we have EPA laws that say
we can't pollute; if we could pollute, we could do more coal or
something.
So we are going to run into the whole notion of
deregulation, and it is going to be even difficult to try to
regulate. The battle is going to be to try to hold on to things
that are positive in the overall scheme of things. But the
argument about growth and jobs tend to be the overriding factor
now.
So, I just think, though, that people like those of you
here are very essential to this. We will certainly continue to
express our views, and I just like to thank all of you for
testifying. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. I would like to thank you, too, for your
expertise, your guidance, your wisdom.
Victor Hugo once said, ``There is nothing more powerful
than an idea whose time has come.'' This is the year, and it
may take a year to get this enacted, but we have got to go and
give the tools and empower our own Government to have the
ability to restrict these dual-use capable technologies from
being used against very fine people who want freedom. And you
have provided us tremendous insights, and I thank you so much.
Please, I know you will be there as we move through this
process because we are not going to let up until this is law.
And I expect we will have huge obstacles in the near term, but
at the end of the day, once this is enacted and then we will be
talking about reauthorization and improvements in the outer
years, people will say, why wasn't that done sooner? So, again,
you are long stayers in the fight for human rights. Thank you
so much for your insights today and for being here.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:45 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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[Note: The previous report is not reprinted in its entirety but is
available in committee records.]
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