Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. companies including Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) are teaming up to teach activists how to protect themselves from official harassment as they use social media to organize protests.
“We have to be willing to keep coming up with new ways of getting over, under, around and through the walls and other techniques that are used to prevent people from freely communicating,” Clinton said yesterday at a training session in Vilnius, Lithuania, for about 80 activists.
Clinton visited the training session, which her department calls “Tech Camp,” as part of a three-day trip to Hungary and Lithuania, where she attended a meeting of the Community of Democracies, a group of more than 100 nations that work to promote freedom.
Her broader goal has been to use the example of the protests sweeping the Middle East to reinforce the message that open government and Internet freedom benefit societies and economies the world over.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s technology adviser was there to coach participants, along with executives from San Francisco-based Twitter Inc., Palo Alto, California-based Facebook Inc., Microsoft and Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA.
Internet Freedom
Ensuring Internet freedom so activists can use social media sites such as Twitter to organize and communicate safely is “one of the highest priorities during my time as secretary of state,” Clinton said yesterday.
The State Department has spent about $50 million to teach activists how to circumvent firewalls and protect themselves in repressive nations, said an administration official who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record. The Vilnius technology camp is the third they’ve held since December 2010, after sessions in Santiago, Chile, and Jakarta, Indonesia.
The gray-paneled conference room where Clinton spoke was crowded with activists from 22 different countries, their chairs two rows deep along the walls in some places. Most were from Eastern Europe. The 20 trainers came from France, the U.S., Kenya and the UK.
Alec Ross, Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, said one of the trainers’ goals is to teach activists to do their online work more securely. One activist said he attended the U.S.-backed technology camp in Lithuania to learn how to keep his group safe online when it uses social media to organize protests in Belarus. He requested anonymity because he heads an organization that hasn’t been officially registered, a crime punishable by six months to two years in jail in the Republic of Belarus.
Crushing Protests
Belarus President Alexandr Lukashenko has used force to crush post-election demonstrations that began in December and jailed seven of nine candidates who ran against him. Clinton, speaking in Vilnius today, said Lukashenko’s regime “brutally represses the human rights of its citizens.”
During the first of two eleven-hour days at the technology camp, the activist and his colleagues broke into groups to identify challenges.
Among the issues discussed were what to do when a government drowns out Twitter alerts with a flood of messages carrying a group’s special identifying mark, or “hashtag,” as Syria has done. Other questions raised were how to connect social activist groups within a country, how to create real-time maps of events during a crisis and how to communicate in a difficult environment.
On the second day, the groups worked on the problems and presented solutions they had found with their trainers.
Internet Companies
Ross said having Internet company representatives present allows them to understand the difficulties activists encounter on the ground.
“You can’t take for granted in San Francisco people are going to understand what to them might be low-level traffic over a hashtag, but which to people in a small country might be flooding a hashtag,” Ross said.
The group working on that question couldn’t find a good answer. In response, the Twitter representative said his company would work on ways to screen spam, Ross said.
Clinton met with civil society groups from Kenya to Cambodia during her trip, touted the ‘Tech Camp’ and announced help for non-profit groups threatened by their governments. Clinton also urged established democracies to assist countries such as Libya and Egypt that are trying to make the transition.
Tunisia, Moldova
Clinton praised the Community of Democracies’ new “Democracy Partnership Challenge.” That program will pair emerging democracies -- Tunisia and Moldova this year -- with more established ones to provide advice on issues such as holding elections and building an independent judiciary.
The Community of Democracies has also set up a “Lifeline” funding mechanism to help groups that are coming under pressure from their governments, she said. The $12 million dollar fund can be used to help activists who might be injured or jailed in the course of their work, said the administration official.
Clinton told the activists yesterday they were part of “a global movement” and urged them “to create solidarity with each other in order to maximize your impact.” As the two-day camp ended, one of the working groups announced they would gather e-mail addresses to test and share with their fellow participants new ways to get around Internet firewalls.
The Belorussian and a compatriot said the experience had given them a sense of comfort as they return to deal with what they called the daily threat of life and work in their country.
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