State’s Schizophrenic Stance on Internet Freedom

Helle Dale / May 18, 2010

To fund or not to fund – the State Department’s Hamlet like approach to Internet freedom.

Having unequivocally declared Internet freedom one of the Obama administration’s top priorities back in January, the State Department has been sending out confusingly mixed signals ever since. In fact, what is emerging is a picture of a thoroughly schizophrenic policy, pushed and pulled between various parts of the State Department and Congress. This is too bad, for Internet freedom could well become one of the defining political and human rights issues of the 21^st century. It deserves the unwavering commitment from the U.S. government that Secretary of State Clinton promised in her speech at the Newseum on January 10, just when the battle between the Chinese government and the Internet giant Google was heating up.

The most recent example of the confusion surrounding this critically important policy was the story run by the BBC on May 12 that the State Department had awarded $1.5 million to the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) – a group run by the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China — whose software Freegate is designed to circumvent China’s censors and by all accounts does that very successfully. (more…)