The Clinton Internet Doctrine: Internet Access is the New Freedom of Assembly
[Source: Change.org, by Nathaniel Whittemore; January 22, 2010]
If freedom of speech gives people the right to express their viewpoints, freedom of assembly gives people the right to get together and act. In other words, it's the business end of the freedom stick.
In a powerful speech yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally included internet freedom as part of a 21st-century conception of that right. The speech's timing makes it particularly poignant, given Google's dramatic announcement last week that they will no longer fold under Chinese government pressure to censor search results -- even if that means leaving behind a 30% share in a market of 1.3 billion people.
The speech is already being hailed for its articulation of what's being called the "Clinton Internet Doctrine," and was the most forceful articulation of the need for freedom we've yet seen from this administration. Indeed, the speech -- more than anything I've ever seen by a public official -- explicitly recognized that the internet is not just a useful tool, or even an essential modern platform, but is instead the one network that "magnifies the power and potential of all others."
This kind of language shows a bedrock understanding of a fact that those of up who have grown up with the internet intuitively understand: access cannot be a privilege -- it must be a right.
The internet's power as a platform for global connection and transformation is only now just coming into its own. The first iteration of the commercial internet showed us what it meant to distribute information globally, and instantly, with a simple click. Over the last few years, the rise of social networks demonstrated how information about our friends and contacts could bind us closer together, and create new opportunities for collaboration.
With the rise of platforms like Twitter, we're seeing the emerging power of rapid personal publishing networks to shift the nature, personality and rawness of our information -- not just in scale, but in kind. The immediacy of voices heard on the ground in recent political turmoil in Iran and violent conflict in the Middle East only reinforced that we're dealing with something entirely new.
But if on the internet, as Walter Benjamin wrote, "there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism," we also know there's no tool for upsetting autocratic power that can't be used to simultaneously suppress dissent and brutally reinforce the status quo.
That is why Clinton's speech is such a landmark. It affirms that the United States views any government's interference with its citizens' online lives -- the use of cyber attacks to gain information, denial of access to dissenting information, etc. -- as a violation of rights, and abhorrent to the freedoms the US believes all people deserve equally.
The speech has drawn rave reviews from unlikely corners, including the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which usually has a reflex hostility toward anything Clinton. In part, this has to do with the fact that the speech is not an isolated set of words, but rather the capstone following a series of linked actions by the State Department -- for example, the delegations of technology leaders they've organized to go to places like Mexico City and Iraq, with the goal of addressing the internet's power to address local problems.
As with any discussion of "rights" or "freedom," words can only be the starting point, and must be backed up by action. But nonetheless, on their own, the words Secretary Clinton chose -- in their power, clarity and forthrightness -- are pretty damn exciting.
Photo Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
