Is this more lip service from Clinton? Yup....show them the money Hilary so that the anti-censorship techies can upgrade their network once and for all in order to block oppressive regimes effectively, especially China. The only reason why things are moving at a crawl pace is because DOS has been sitting on $25-30 million that should have been allocated to the global internet freedom companies a year ago. Whose side is DOS on again? Somebody, please tell them to wake up cuz this kind of behaviour is only benefiting dictators.
NPR wrote:
Senate Republicans complain in a new report that the State Department isn't financing Internet freedoms, at least when it comes to China. More
Business Week wrote: Today, Clinton noted that two billion people are online, nearly one-third of humankind, and said the U.S. supports the universal right of all people to gather and communicate online, the “freedom to connect” as she called it.
...Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, called on Clinton to transfer at least $8 million of available funds to the Broadcasting Board of Governors to focus on circumvention technology. The agency, which oversees government media including Voice of America, funneled a $1.5 million grant last year to the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a group that provides anti-censorship software and is associated with the Falun Gong, a Buddhist spiritual sect banned in China.
While Clinton acknowledged that “some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology,” she argued that the State Department is taking “a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training.”Clinton also asserted that there are costs to governments who try to open the Internet for business and close it for political or social expression.
More at Business Week
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