The irony... Note: The deadline for this Request for Proposals has passed. Department of State Public Notice Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Request for Proposals: Democracy, Human Rights, and Rule of Law in the Near East Region. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) announces a Request for Proposals from organizations interested in submitting proposals for projects that promote democracy, human rights, and rule of law in the Near East region. PLEASE NOTE: DRL strongly urges applicants to access immediately www.grants.gov in order to obtain a username and password. DRL invites organizations to submit proposals outlining program concepts and capacity to manage projects targeting the following issues: Empowerment and Protection of Persons with Disabilities in the Near East. Please refer directly to DRL’s posted Proposal Submission Instructions (PSI), updated in November 2012, available at
the sequel As Prepared for Delivery Good morning. I am delighted to be here to speak with you and through C-SPAN to the viewing audience around the United States. The daily briefings I do are on C-SPAN every day and feature snappy repartee with reporters who are a professional and talented group, who have been covering foreign policy in some cases longer than I have been in and around government. And this is my 34th year in some facet of national security policy. I came to appreciate the difference between the State Department Press Corps and journalists who cover other agencies or branches of the government. “Really,” the dean of the State Department Press Corps thundered. What I do every day is to enunciate the United States Government view on world affairs. Today we use a variety of media to communicate to governments and people around the world – formal briefings that are covered by traditional media, as well as social media to bypass governments and communicate directly with people.
WL & Internet Freedom Here's a list of essential posts on current Wikileaks controversy, starting with coverage by techPresident's editors and including posts by the various speakers in Personal Democracy Forum's December 11 New York City symposium on Wikileaks and internet freedom, plus others we've found useful and/or provocative. Micah L. Sifry, "From Wikileaks to OpenLeaks, Via the Knight News Challenge," December 17, 2010. How a $532,000 grant the Knight Foundation decided not to award fits into a creative split in the WikiLeaks organization and the creation of a less centralized engine for safe leaking, OpenLeaks. Nick Judd, "The Art of Anonymous," December 16, 2010. Nancy Scola, "The Web's Social Contract: Does It Exist? Micah L Sifry, "After Wikileaks: The Promise of Internet Freedom, For Real," December 5, 2010. Nick Judd, "Wikileaks Has More Google Juice Than Justin Bieber, But what Will Searchers See?" Micah L. Jeff Jarvis, "Wikileaks: Power Shifts From Secrecy to Transparency," December 4, 2010.
Reining in freedom on the Web Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens to speakers during a press conference at Facebook on Wednesday, October 6, 2010 in Palo Alto, Calif. Zuckerberg announced 3 new features including a new way to form groups. Reining in freedom on the Web A few days ago, Facebook asked me to change my user name. I had chosen a name composed entirely of Braille characters. When I signed up, Facebook asked me for my real name and verified my identity by getting me to enter a confirmation code it sent to my mobile phone. Facebook offers a cozy cocoon to its members, who can use it to communicate without being flooded with spam. Interactions on Facebook are always positive: You are allowed to say you "like" something by clicking on an icon, but you can't say you dislike it. But Facebook can sometimes be arbitrary. To help prevent spamming, members are invited to report nuisance messages: Facebook then suspends the nuisance user's account. ©2010 Le Monde diplomatique
Internet Freedom Fraud (Morozov) Originally posted on Slate. In March of this year, Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. government had granted a license to a company whose software would "help information continue to flow freely into and out of Iran." That software was called Haystack, an anti-censorship tool that received glowing coverage from the BBC, NPR, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, and many other news sources. Perhaps it was Haystack's teasing, provocative slogan -- "Good luck finding that needle" -- that so intrigued the reporters. Heap came up with the idea for Haystack during the 2009 Iranian protests, when the country's draconian censorship system prevented communication with the outside world. There are plenty of other tools that can help circumvent censorship. It all sounded great in theory, until security professionals began asking Austin Heap for a copy of Haystack's code. Heap's ambitious plans for Haystack went far beyond Iran. SHADISHD173/AFP/Getty Images
Timeline WL- Attacks On Sunday 28 November WikiLeaks began releasing the first of its 250,000 leaked US embassy cables. Almost immediately, a hacking attack known as a "DDoS" – distributed denial of service – attack tried to knock it off the net. These are the attacks that have followed in the succeeding days. Sunday 28 November 2010 • TECH: DDoS attack hits WikiLeaks as first set of US diplomatic cables is published. Wednesday 1 December 2010 • TECH: Tableau Software, which offers free software for data visualisation, removes the public views of graphics built using information about the diplomatic cables. • POLITICS: Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, calls for WikiLeaks to be taken offline. • TECH Amazon removes WikiLeaks's content from its EC2 cloud service, but later insists it did so because the content could cause harm to people and did not belong to WikiLeaks – and that it was not due to political pressure or the hacker attacks against the site. Friday 3 December 2010
Intermediary censorship By Index on Censorship / 3 December, 2010 Private ownership of web hosting raises serious questions for free expression, says Jillian C York WikiLeaks’ latest release is making its rounds in the media. Links to cablegate.wikileaks.org are circulating, posted on Twitter and Facebook, passed around in emails. After several releases from the whistleblowing organisation, we’ve begun to take for granted that the leaked information — at least what’s already online — will be accessible to us. As Rebecca MacKinnon points out, this isn’t the first time Lieberman has made such a call; in 2008, the Senator demanded removal of “content produced by Islamist terrorist organisations” from video-sharing site YouTube. There is, of course, a precedent for content removal at government request as well…plenty of it, in fact. These examples represent a broader trend, which Ethan Zuckerman has termed “intermediary censorship.” Tags: free speech | intermediary censorship | wikileaks
WL & 21st Cent. statecraft Have 250,000 leaks sunk the State Department’s ‘Internet Freedom’ policy? by Roy Revie As the fallout of Cablegate continues to consume column inches, gigabytes, and cabinet meetings across the world, the realisation that this is about more than one man, one organization, and one massive leak seems to be slowly sinking in. While some argue that stories and comment focusing on the process of the leak and the fallout for the organisation only distract from the stories contained within the cables themselves, it is clear that this element is as vital (in the short term at least) as the contents of the cables. We find ourselves in the middle of an unprecedented public debate on Internet freedom and the role of the state online. Perhaps ominously, the speech was prefaced by a shout-out to Joe Lieberman for aiding the “passage of the VOICE Act, which speaks to Congress’s and the American people’s commitment to internet freedom, a commitment that crosses party lines and branches of government”.
20th cent. roots of 21st cent. statecraft Let's imagine a parallel universe for a second. In that universe, the U.S. State Department decides that energy -- rather than the Internet -- would form one of the core pillars of "21st century statecraft." To that end, the secretary of state would give a speech about some highly abstract and ambiguous concept like "environmental freedom" that would strike the right chord with the media -- if only because it promises a greener future for all of us! Since energy-inspired "21st century statecraft" would be difficult to practice without courting the private sector -- the likes of Haliburton, Exxon Mobile, and Chevron -- their executives would be taken on regular tours of exotic places and invited to private dinners with the secretary of state. People spearheading this kind of energy-inspired "21st century statecraft" would have a very friendly relationship with the corporate world, occasionally leaving government service to work for the giant energy corporations. ... p.s.