VIDEO: Times VS. W.L. A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears. 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.
To Host World Press Freedom Day in 2011. The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 - May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press. The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers.
The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.
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. How the hive mind recognizes itself, design-wise. 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. Tom Watson, "Assange v.
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. The name I had chosen wasn't obscene, it did not incite racial hatred, it was not an attempt to usurp the name of the all-powerful Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO, founder and majority shareholder), nor was it even vaguely similar to a registered trademark. I had chosen a name composed entirely of Braille characters.
The engineers at Facebook had suddenly decided that this was no longer acceptable. 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.
Freedom on the Web. 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. The company refused to remove most content, its lawyer noting that it was covered by the First Amendment. There is, of course, a precedent for content removal at government request as well…plenty of it, in fact.
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.
In this debate much has been written about the motives and background of Wikileaks (some bad, some excellent) while other parties involved have avoided the same scrutiny. One example Clinton gave of the utility of internet freedom is enlightening: Like this: 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. 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. Or maybe it was the story of its founder Austin Heap, the twentysomething IT specialist from San Francisco who, prior to founding Haystack in June 2009, spent much of his time killing dragons in World of Warcraft.
Just nine months later, Heap was given the Innovator of the Year award by the Guardian. Soon after, Heap claimed that he was headed to Washington, D.C., to meet with Sen. Heap's ambitious plans for Haystack went far beyond Iran.