What does Internet freedom mean to you?
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a major speech on Internet freedom February 15. In it, she talked about the importance of the Internet as an open platform for innovation, ideas and economic growth.
She discussed key Internet freedom issues of the past year, including China’s crackdown on Google; Wikileaks; authoritarian regimes cracking down on social media; and the Blackberry service outage. The speech was streamed live, here.
What do you think about these issues? How do they affect you? What does Internet freedom mean to you?
Photo by SEIU International, Creative Commons Attribution License
Internet freedom
Well, Every body has right to his or her opinion. The universal right to gather hold and disseminate Any information of his or her choice, without authority restriction. But the contrary is always what we harvest from countries that are unblessed with repressive regime. countries where the rights of the dictator is made to be the peoples right. They have a distorted definition of democracy" Government of the dictator by the doctor for him and his cronies" This to me is unfortunate. Where government go as far as censoring Internet mails and taking it more down, they restricted and deprived Their citizens not just of information but of it's medium. The authoritarian system of government is out dated and have out lived it's relevance. This are some of the facts that these dictators knows and are unwilling to admit. An African adage states thus "He who holds a man down, stays down with him" The consequence of some of these repressive dictators are: constituting a go slow to the development of their nationhood and the continent and denying their nation multiple-diminutional brain that would have contribute to national development and deprived their people the opportunity to explore the vast leadership options that nature has blessed them with. The middle east and the northern Africa worked up to this reality that they must take their destiny in their hands and say no to the calumny and hanky pan key of dictators. Who ever ox is geode they don't give a damn. The restriction of information is barbaric not just outdated And you can not used the past to make a mark in the present.
Comments on Hillary Clinton's Speech
“The internet did not do any of those things; people did”. I think this is the most striking phrase that Mrs. Clinton used in her speech regarding the civilian disobedience in Egypt and Iran. Without concrete facts such as physical violence, bad economic conditions and political oppression no online social media tool has the power to pour people on to the streets. What made the people shout frantically at Tahrir Square as “The streets are ours” was the power of hunger and the feeling of being cornered. It is very important to note that all these revolutions in the Arab world were triggered by a university graduate street vendor who set himself on fire because of unemployment; not by Facebook or Twitter. However, when all the right conditions actualized, these social media tools accelerated and paved the way for the revolutions. Hence, although they played a vital role in these movements, Facebook and/or Twitter can not be named as the champion of the revolutions, the credit should go to the actual people who made these revolutions happen. The social media helped people to organise and most importantly, enabled people to reveal the cruel and wild face of these regimes through blogs, photos and videos and legitimated the uprisings for international community, almost a precondition for all contemporary revolutions. In the Egyptian case, if there were not a real support from the international community, the protests would not last this long and Mubarak might not have decided to leave.
Hillary Clinton describes the internet as the “public space of the 21st century” and says that as every public space, it needs a “guide book prepared by a shared vision on how to use this virtual square”. At this point she mentions the importance of the balance between “liberty and security” and “transparency and confidentiality” . I agree with her the example she gave as a negative one is contraversial. She states that “by publishing diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks exposed people to even greater risk” but I think even Hillary Clinton herself can not deny that the cables revealing Bin Ali’s corruption was one of the impulsive force behind what happened in Tunisia. Thus, I think it is not so easy to form a ”shared vision” since what is bad for you may have good consequences for the others, given we accept that there is a constant clash of interests in the world. Thus, I think that we should not try to form a shared vision and instead try to formulate a strong set of universal values regardless of interests of specific countries of groups.
“The better answer to offensive speech is more speech”. I liked Mrs. Clinton’s approach towards the oppressive actions of governments which often try to censor the internet with the excuse to block offensive speech. There is always a thin line between criticism and defamation, and the court decisions are almost always made in accordance with the ideological stance of the judges. What I find somewhat problematic is the US government’s “open support” to the internet activists. It is always good that a government is promoting democratic values and supporting freedom of expression globally. However, to manifest that the US will supply the protesters all they need and will protect them from the attacks of their repressive governments actually cut against the protesters position and weaken their rightful actions. If the people actually perceive these protests as being backed by a foreign government, this might actually create antipathy towards these protests and prevent the cause from being adopted by larger segments of the society. In some countries, the protesters are actually at the risk of being blamed as foreign agents or traitors and might even be executed for that. At the end of the day, for the protest movements to be effective and have long lasting effects, the demands should be indigeneous and the societies should be able to write their own destinies regardless of how difficult that may be.
IRREVERSIBLE REALITY
The fact that from prestigious academic stage the responsible for foreign policy one of the world's most powerful countries speaks about Wikileaks, authoritarian regimes cracking down on social media, is a definite confirmation that social networks and Internet are an irreversible reality of our life. Part of states are leaders in this, others are a little back, but the process of "internetization" is irreversible. So the states have to note and cohere with this situation.
For me the Internet freedom is everybody's right to know, to be informed and to be in contact in anytime in anywhere...
Internet Freedom
Internet has become a venue to freely express opinions and voice demands for more democracy and freedoms from authoritarian regimes. As Mrs. Clinton says gathering under a cause in the virtual world is equally same with the right to assembly in Tahrir Square or Times Square. These are universal rights. In today’s world, it is almost impossible to prevent people from getting access to the world outside them. Individuals are fully aware of their rights and the developments beyond their own countries.
Today we witness movements of peoples in those countries to call for more rights, which are absolutely fair demands and are recognized by many countries in the world. Those demands are globally finding support and even as we see in Turkey’s example, after pressure from the local media and the public opinion, the government made a strong call to Egypt’s Mubarak to fulfill his people’s demands and to go immediately. But of course, this reaction should be consistent and embrace all peoples calling for democracy. Turkey should have shown the same reaction when the regime in Tehran treated badly and tortured the dissidents in the last elections, instead of congratulating Ahmadinejad. I believe the governments should also act responsibly and defend common values for everyone instead of taking a country-to-country approach.
Of course it is also important how the authoritarian administrations interpret people’s movements. I firmly believe tolerance to differing opinions is a strong indicator of democracy. The use of pressure is not a way out but rather isolate those administrations while strongly demonstrating the fairness of the demands.
Internet Freedom
freedom itself is a relative term and every one should have access to enjoy it! But it is fallacy of all of us about the notion of getting absolute freedom. Absolute freedom tends to absolute distortion as well. On the other hand control distorts human possibility. So tough to define a comprehensive approach!