Clinton urged to fund fight for Internet freedom

New York: Five U.S. senators are publicly urging Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to move faster to support organizations that are helping people in countries like Iran and China circumvent restrictions on Internet use.

In a letter written by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and made public on Wednesday, the senators ask Clinton to quickly spend $45 million that has been earmarked over the last two years to support Internet freedom but has not been spent.

The senators also complain that restrictions on who may apply for the money, recently outlined by the State Department, appear to exclude the organizations that are creating the most popular tools for getting around censorship.

The letter was drafted before Google accused China last week of attacking its computers and said it was no longer willing to censor its search results there. But it has picked up more supporters since then.

Efforts to give financial support to groups creating such software recall anti-communist programs during the cold war, when the U.S. government backed broadcasters like Radio Free Europe.

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But in the online age the nature of censorship has changed, and regimes like those in China and Iran often deny their populations access to Web news outlets and sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Political advocates and others are also subject to having their online activities scrutinized.

Programs like Psiphon, Freegate and Tor, available free online, allow people in those countries to bounce their Internet traffic off servers in other parts of the world, bypassing local restrictions. But the organizations that have developed those programs say they are constrained by resources and consumed by a never-ending technological arms race with government censors.

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Some critics are also asking whether the U.S. government is wary of backing Internet freedom organizations with ties to Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is suppressed in China, for fear of antagonizing the Chinese government.

"Officials at the State Department have sacrificed the interests of the demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, the interests of Google, and the principle of Internet freedom in closed societies on the altar of not making China go ballistic," said Mike Horowitz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization.The institute is advising the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a group affiliated with Falun Gong that makes popular tools like Freegate.

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In December, the State Department asked for financing proposals from organizations with technologies that "maximize free expression and the free flow of information and increase access to the Internet."

The senators, in their letter, say that the State Department's guidelines require organizations to demonstrate a presence in countries with repressive regimes, which would appear to rule out groups like the consortium that operate mainly in the United States.
In an interview, Michael Posner, the State Department's assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, said every organization would be considered "on the strength of whether they have a tool that will help advance the effort." He said the State Department aimed to operate like Silicon Valley venture capitalists, financing as many disparate efforts as possible.

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"The ways in which the technology is evolving means that it is increasingly difficult and inevitably impossible for governments to clamp down on that, unless they want to become North Korea," Posner said. "Our job is to hasten the day when these controls break down and people can communicate freely."

But the people creating such tools are expressing frustration with their inability to meet increasing global demand for their services, and with their lack of success in getting U.S. government support.

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"I think we just don't get it, it's politics," said David Tian, a NASA engineer and Falun Gong practitioner who works on the Global Internet Freedom Consortium in his free time.