 Hallå! May I just have your attentions for a few minutes. Good evening and welcome to House of Sweden. My name is Jonas Hofström and I am the Swedish ambassador to the United States and the embassy is proud, proud to co host tonight's event with the new American Foundation. In the early 1990s, our minister for foreign affairs, Carl Bildt, was Sweden's prime minister. Mr Bildt sent en email till den president, president Bill Clinton. That was the first email ever between two heads of government. Carl Bildt's interest in IT has only increased over the years and today he is a devoted blogger and Twitter. Nowadays, I don't have to wait for the diplomatic pouch to arrive at Dallas Airport to know what's on the minister's mind. I just need to read his daily blog. Internet freedom is at the top of Sweden's foreign policy agenda. Our policy is quite straightforward. Human rights should apply online as well as offline. As freedom of expression applies to the internet and the internet has become a fundamental instrument for people to express themselves. We must increase our efforts to keep the internet free from censorship and surveillance. The US government is one of our closest partners, and our joint efforts have gotten internet freedom on the agenda of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Both our governments provide support to dissidents and activists in need of targeted support. Governments play an important role here, of course, but so do corporations. There is a growing understanding that service providers and online companies have to protect free speech online. An important part of our work is therefore to urge corporations to agree on common standards that won't violate human rights. To apply human rights online does not mean that we need new human rights. On the contrary, we just need to strengthen those rights that we already have. Rebecca McKinnon is one of the world's leading experts in this field and my government has often relied on her advice. Rebecca was already involved in the issue two years ago when she attended the very first internet freedom expert meeting in Stockholm. And we look forward to continued cooperation with you, Rebecca. Rebecca's excellent new book, Consent of the Network, shines a light on every entity, governments, corporations, civil society and individuals that have both a stake in and a responsibility for protecting rights in a networked world. Congratulations, Rebecca. Let me introduce a nice moderator, Steve Cole. Steve is president of New America Foundation and a Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist. The embassy is very grateful to him for inviting us to co-host tonight's event. Steve, the floor is yours. Ambassador, thank you so much for such a gracious introduction and for your hospitality and the gulf of distance between ourselves and you. Seems like it should be closed. Please come forward, oh people. And bring your drinks and your conviviality. All right. Well, we're going to talk just for a little while and take some questions from you and then let you get back to your conversation and the food and drink. And we're very pleased to be in partnership with the embassy here. Sweden is, as the ambassador said, one of the most important governments in the world right now in both thinking about the peculiar problems of freedom and privacy in the online public square and also as a convener, a credible convener of complicated conversations across governments and between governments and citizens and governments and corporations. So this is really the ideal place for this conversation. Rebecca and I will talk for about 20 or 25 minutes and then, as I say, I'll take a few questions from you and we'll go forward from there. I will avoid the Charlie Rose question, which is why did you write this book? So let me ask a slightly different version of that question, which is you, as the ambassador said, you've been working in this space long before it became so prominent and you have in this important survey described a public square that, in many ways, resembles the public squares that we've all been wrestling over politically in the world for a few centuries now. But in other ways is really quite different from public spaces that we're used to visualizing in Tahir Square or elsewhere. And because of the role of private actors in this virtual public space. In describing your ambitions in this book, will you say something to get us started about why you think this public space, this political space, is different from the physical spaces where protesters have assembled and shouted at kings and that sort of thing for a long time. Absolutely. Before I answer your question, I just want to echo a few thanks that you gave both to the ambassador, to the Swedish embassy for generous hosting, and to the New America Foundation, without which this book would not have been completed nearly as quickly or as well. And to the many people in the room who have provided a lot of support and inspiration, there are quite a number of you here. A few family members, Bennett Freeman, my partner in crime, who has read many different drafts and without whose editorial skills it wouldn't have been as good either. And so I just want to make sure I get those thanks before I actually answer your question. That's right, give you some time to think about it. But yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, we're now in a situation in most modern societies where as citizens, we are relying on digital platforms and services and devices to conduct not only our personal affairs and our business, but also increasingly our politics and our political discourse and to be informed. But these spaces are owned, operated and created by the private sector for the most part. And there are standards that are common and that are unlicensed and so on and shared. But primarily this is a privately owned and operated space. So it's kind of like the public sphere has gone into a shopping mall and you have sort of a new type of overlapping sovereignty that I sort of talk about where you have internet companies in which people are congregating from all over the world and using these spaces to challenge the sovereignty of physical government sometimes. And then, of course, physical governments trying to exercise power, of course, over these companies as well in ways that sometimes influences people far outside the constituency of those governments. And you also have a situation where the companies themselves are exercising a sort of governance function over the people using the services and acting, we would hope, is benign sovereigns. But their level of accountability and concern for the civil rights and political rights of the people using their services varies tremendously from some to zero. Well, and this is such an important set of insights in the book. But I remember when we were first fortunate enough to be luring you to New America, you were thinking about that proposition in reference to other social responsibility movements and corporate responsibility movements that had preceded this set of dilemmas around the internet. And, for example, movements to prevent shoe companies from using child labor, making basketball shoes or from shooting protesters while extracting minerals from the ground and so forth. And that you were going to try to develop insights that would create an analogous movement of citizen consciousness and rights and also corporate standards that would improve this. And so my question is how far are we along on that trail and what are the obstacles? Well, we're probably pre 1970 Earth Day to make an analogy that I think people are just beginning to be aware that companies, internet companies, technology companies have a responsibility to free expression and privacy and that they need to be pushed. And companies, I think some of the more enlightened ones are starting to recognize that they can actually deliver value by showing that they care about these things more than perhaps their competitors do. But it's very early days and I think the movement, what we might call the nascent internet freedom movement or something like that, certainly got a big push just in the past few weeks with the protests online against the protect online privacy. I mean the stop online, but I can never say this acronym SOPA stop online piracy act and the accompanying Senate Bill that internet companies and internet users kind of banded together to to protest against. And I think that we've seen kind of an awakening among a lot of internet users that people need to get more engaged in politics and also pay more attention both to what governments and companies are doing. Well, so since you just ripped the subject from the headlines, let me ask a question that I had further down my list, but I'm curious about it, someone who's a couple degrees removed from the front lines of that movement but follows it. The very fact that corporations are competing with each other to control this space gives rise to the doubt that in spontaneous online grassroots reaction like the one that knocked SOPA off of its track could be possibly polluted by the same corporate competition that has shaped so much of the rest of the web. And I guess my question is how do you evaluate the sort of authenticity of grassroots resistance to piracy legislation, the pressure on privacy legislation in Europe that's underway now. Does it feel that it can retain its independence from other kinds of corporate interest? Well, I think a lot of activism ends up being strategic and so that I think the different cases end up being quite different and I think with the anti SOPA movement you saw a convergence of interest between the civil liberties and human rights for expression and grassroots internet user activism side and a certain segment of internet companies that had commercial reasons for wanting to oppose SOPA. And the free expression reasons kind of overlapped whereas in other policy issues say for instance privacy regulation you have citizens groups and companies and governments in very different configuration you might have citizens groups with governments against the companies in I think in Europe much more and so depending on the issue I think the alignments are different you sometimes have citizens calling on governments to curb excesses by companies and sometimes you have citizens strategizing with certain companies to curb what they feel are excesses or unrepresentative behavior or laws by parts of government and other parts of industry. So so it does move around and yeah it's so it's kind of hard to answer the question of you know does activism need to be pure in order to be legitimate. I guess can it retain to what degree is that agenda and independent that in grassroots agenda over time I guess is that's what we'll have to see I think you know I mean certainly and to go back to your sort of very striking where pre-earth day 1970 if we were to reach I don't know the Al Gore campaign of or the earth and the balance phase of all of this consciousness and communication about rights and about expectations both by customers and by citizens. What would be the signs of change in the conduct of either governments or corporations that would to you mark that that progress. I think I think a number of things I think you'd see an across the board commitment at least by democratic governments that legislation dealing with the internet whatever problem it's trying to solve would seek to ensure that it is human rights and civil liberties compatible that that there be a commitment to core for expression and privacy principles in pursuing whatever problems and solutions with the internet and and a commitment by democratic countries not to pursue trade agreements and other multilateral arrangements that end up hurting free expression and privacy. So that's on the government side. I think on the company side you'd want to see companies saying with pride we believe in free expression and privacy. We believe in protecting the rights of our users and this is part of our value rather than kind of being afraid to use the term human rights and really agreeing to recognizing that they need to be held accountable. I mean as we've seen in other sectors and there's some people here in the room who've worked on initiatives in other sectors with say you know manufacturing or the extractive sector that for quite some time now companies in the in the mining and extractive sector have signed on to agreements where they agree that they are going to work with civil society and with socially responsible investors and and some governments to avoid you know the collateral human rights abuses as a result of their business and you have manufacturers also you know for a long time recognizing they can't go it alone they actually need to make not only make commitments but you know have external communities be able to evaluate and confirm that they're really living up to their commitments and other industries have been willing to do this and so far very few internet and telecommunications companies have have recognized that they need to do this if they want to maintain public trust over the long run. I think they're more are coming to realize this and I think that that's so we need to see that and then on the citizen side I think we will see more of a coming of age when people are really making voting decisions and really pushing their policy makers on internet related issues which is only just starting to happen and and also really organizing to get the companies that whose services and products they use to change things they don't like and and it's possible to do a lot more of that I think. And so of course I'm not sure everyone here knows that one of the reasons that you've been such a thought leader in the space and arrived in it so early was because of the of the assignment that you undertook as a CNN correspondent in China and you were sort of present as a as a Mandarin speaker in the beginning of the migration of Chinese descent online and the formation of the contest that we now all know about between the Chinese state and those of its citizens who who speak online and I wondered if you could just there's some I'm quite striking anecdotes and voices that you bring into the book to crystallize these universal issues but before I read one of them why don't you just talk a little bit about how your correspondence in China led you into this passion into this space. Yeah well I was in China working for CNN when the internet arrived in China commercially in 1995. And as Western journalists at that time we were very excited because it was a way for people to communicate in a manner that seemed like the government could not control but so I began to cover stories about them of course as a journalist began to use the internet to get information out more quickly than than I'd been able to before but then the government of course started blocking websites and so I started experiencing and observing how the government was moving to try and control and surveil the space and in the beginning of the book I talked about you know realizing that a friend of mine I was sitting around having dinner with some Chinese friends and talking about a book by Timothy Garten Ash about East Germany when the wall came down and everybody could see their stasi files for the first time and found out who'd been spying on them and their friends, their family and so on and I kind of began to realize that in China when that day comes people might not actually end up having that same revelatory moment even if they do see their files because what their files are going to consist of are going to be email transcripts and cell phone text messaging records and cell phone tower records and you know their chat messages and and you know the key loggers that was installed by viruses on their computers and this kind of thing and it's a very different type of world and there's another term you coin in the book Facebook of Stan which I think resonates and actually in fairness Facebook of Stan and Google Dum is the title of a chapter and the chapter opens with a Hong Kong scholar who is talking to you in a similar kind of environment and and he says he likens Facebook to a country. This is to speak to your observations about this complicated sovereignty. He says allow me to make a wild analogy one I believe is not entirely out of left field. Many people know that there's censorship in China. Many people also tell me one the poor Chinese must feel really repressed or two they must be all right with it. But ask yourself this if I decide not to leave Facebook yet I know they do not care at all about my privacy. What does that mean. How is that different from the people who continue to use the internet in China day in and day out despite the prevalent and prolific practices of censorship. That is surveillance is as pernicious as censorship. He's saying and and it does take us to this set of questions about privacy which I just wanted you to expand on a little bit. I am not a constitutional lawyer or rights lawyer but I have the impression that our struggle to define a privacy right is less mature than our conviction about our rights to free expression and belief. And what do you use. How would you define the struggle for privacy in political spaces on the internet. Well you know I mean there's there's a lot of people in this country particularly who like to write privacy is dead get over it. And you know and it is hard to define and we do make a lot of trade offs just in order to use certain services and have conveniences. We're handing over certain privacy but I think in a human rights and political context it really comes down to can dissent be possible. At what level of privacy and freedom from pervasive surveillance do you need in order for dissent to be possible in order for peaceful opposition to be possible in order for unpopular speech to be possible. You know just people with unpopular ideas. I mean one of the founding ideas of this country was that to avoid tyranny of majority and to enable that we have a system where somebody who has a highly unpopular idea has an opportunity to advocate that idea so that it may become perhaps a popular idea someday or that if if only a small minority of people think a particular law is unjust that they have an opportunity to advocate for the overturning of that law. And so if we completely lose privacy if everything is completely out in the open what kind of society do we end up are we going to end up having a tyranny of the majority and it's not just for political dissent of course and one of the examples I use in the book within the United States is a woman who was fleeing an abusive husband and didn't want you know she was trying to use the internet to create a support network for herself but she didn't want her husband finding out who her online contacts were and when Google Buzz kind of chained you know suddenly appeared you know in her in the middle of her Gmail and her Google reader that suddenly exposed her privacy in ways that she felt was very dangerous and you can say you know ultimately that's a political issue too because if people can't speak out if people don't feel safe to speak out about problems of abuse and problems of vulnerability that's going to that's marginalizing people not only socially and endangering them but also kind of excluding a segment of people from the political discourse you know or people who don't want their boss to know their sexual orientation or people who don't want their employer to know their political preferences and so I guess the bottom line is that as we're navigating this and obviously people are giving up a lot more information and there are many people who write very eloquently about the importance and all the benefits of openness and sharing and I you know people have a right to be open and share and they're you know open government and so on but if there are if there's no option and no ability to be private or to be anonymous or pseudonymous in a manner that enables sort of minority voices and vulnerable groups to have a space in our social discourse we've lost. Well that's and that's really impressive and articulate and no doubt you thought about this a lot more deeply than than almost all of us here if not all of us and I wonder then do you believe that the solutions this paradigm of opt in credible opt in systems and credible ability to become anonymous or not as an individual chooses. Are those pathways of solutions equally applicable in authoritarian or totalitarian countries and in free ones. Yeah I mean that's that's a very good question. You know I guess in free countries you know you have fewer people who are worried about kind of anonymity but I think I think it is equally important that people be able to choose whether they want to have an online identity tied to their national ID card passport identity or whether they want to have an online identity that is separate in some way and you know right now the problem is that how how do you create those systems you know and Google is actually with Google plus they're now wrestling after being pressured by their users who many of whom were not happy that they were requiring real names and now they're trying to adjust it so that they can allow people to use you know what you would call a persistent pseudonym you know a pen name that kind of has a track record behind it credibility and you know who becomes the identity broker and who is trusted you know it's a tough question but what's happening as a default in a way is that a lot of web sites because you know like a lot of news websites or or kind of online community websites that don't have a lot of infrastructure to kind of manage who's logging in and you know they're trying to avoid spam and trying to avoid harassment on the site just by default say okay you have to use your Facebook login to log into our site and to participate in the conversation on our site or you have to use your Google login and so on and then the individuals are kind of subject to whatever rules Facebook or Google or whoever is imposing and those rules may not necessarily be appropriate or safe for a person in a particular country trying to engage in a particular conversation but the problem is that you know these people don't are not going to trust kind of a local identity broker either so it does become a difficult problem but you know one of the arguments that some people make and I think there may be some people in the room who can talk about this too is that in online communities you know whether or not you're using your real name or not it's questionable about whether that actually reduces hate speech or not. So you guys have been really patient and I'd like to take one or two questions from the audience and before I do that as we finish up here just one last question that last year has been a year of extraordinary political change and turmoil in which the subject or the idea of internet freedom has gone mainstream. Secretary of State has been struggling to define what it means or what government should do about it. Governments like Sweden have been wrestling with this perhaps for a little bit longer but we are here in Washington DC. Everything about your thesis makes me suspect that the State Department is not your lead agency for constructing the ideal world that you're thinking about but what would your advice be to the government of the United States with all of its baggage with all of its history. What can the United States beyond constructing an ideal regime at home as a demonstration and as a refuge. What can it bring to the rest of the world. Well absolutely you know practice what you preach and be consistent as you know but that's always. I mean that's not. We do that really well that's not a new problem. That's an old problem of our human rights policy and so on and I certainly think that it's better to have an internet freedom policy than not to have one even if you don't always live up to it in all your different other policies but I would I would say that beyond sort of trying to serve as a model I think one would be and along with governments like Sweden and so on to really try and bring together at least all democracies you know country countries that are willing to make a commitment to internet freedom to really talk about how do we balance as democratic societies these concerns of yes we need security yes we need privacy yes we need to protect children yes you know we need to defend against cyber attack yes we have intellectual property issues that are real and we also have free expression privacy and civil liberties issues on the internet and and as as democracies we need to work this out together rather than in a piecemeal fashion because if you do it in a piecemeal fashion then you end up having it you know a set of trade agreements that end up you know being aimed at protecting intellectual property but kind of contradict the internet freedom agenda and things go very quickly awry and then the rest of the world who are who would really like to are kind of depending on things working out become very cynical and disappointed so I think it's it's important to kind of be committed and coordinated to having that discourse and and I think the other thing is to be really genuinely committed to multi stakeholder engagement and that this is not something that governments can figure out alone the internet was not created by governments you know with some government funding but yeah you know it's it's coordinated it's critical resources are coordinated in a multi stakeholder way it's standards are coordinated and decided by engineers and that I think I mean the whole point of democracies you sort of give up a bit of control in order to gain legitimacy and this is in a way sort of the next level of giving up a little control in order to gain greater legitimacy and in order to be a real leader is that sometimes you lead by enabling and so the extent to which we can lead by enabling civil society to really step in and find solutions that are perhaps best constructed by civil society and enabling and encouraging and sometimes kind of prodding industry to to not only innovate but to care about civil liberties and human rights so that they don't have to be regulated because they'll already be doing the right thing you know I mean that would be the ideal thing so so really to enable rather than to try do anything everything themselves as governments I think would be a good way to go kan I invite one or two questions sure I'm curious have you noticed any change or evolution in and user license agreements for a lot of these online services. Well they change kind of every day and you know that there's actually a couple of websites. Somebody runs kind of a feed of every time a major internet service or platform changes there any of their terms of service or end user license agreement. They kind of ping this feed and it's kind of active every day and so this is the thing as you sign in user license agreement and part of the terms are that this can change at any time and you recognize that. So yeah I mean Facebook is constantly changing terms of service and so are all of them Google just changed its privacy policies very dramatically and anybody who uses who has a Google account has gotten emails and pop ups and messages about it. So yeah people there is an effort among a number of companies to try and simplify them and be more upfront and you know inform people of changes. So for instance Google with all its notifications is kind of one effort not to be sneaky about it at least. But yeah they do change a lot and you know the extent to which they are changed as a result of people kind of pushing and the extent to which they are changed as a result of lawyers you know thinking that it would be a good idea or marketing people you know it's a big combination. Anyone else. One or two others. Yes one I see one hand right there reasonably near the microphone and one over there. I wonder if you have any thoughts about third party storage data storage situations like in the in the mega uploads situation where mega upload based in Hong Kong has to storage companies here people who may have legitimately used mega upload for their own data find themselves having their data storage in the third party who's told by the U.S. Attorney General. Oh yeah you can you can start deleting this data by the way they are not going to delete it but U.S. Attorney's office said yes you could start deleting this data and these companies are it's legal. They can it's up to them. They can delete it if they want. Yeah. Do you have any. Yeah well I mean this is a big problem you know with this is kind of what is known as the cloud computing problem. Which is is that you know our websites our data our email you know everything is increasingly stored on these third party services and they can suspend your account your account for you know if you violate the terms of service they can suspend your account or they can suspend your account if you know there's sort of some legally binding requests that they have to do so and so on. Yeah it's we you know I think the lesson of the mega upload case was just for people who are not familiar with it. It's it's kind of one of these sites where you can you can store large files and share them with people and and use it as backup storage or also use it to transfer files without having to email them and so a lot of people were using it to share music and movies illegally but also a lot of other people were using it and I use another service is very similar just to store a lot of documents or store a lot of your own photos or you know whatever it is that you want to store and businesses depend increasingly particularly small businesses depend on these websites to share information with people in different locations and then you know a bunch of people were using it for illegal file sharing the US government went after the site it's been closed down there they're prosecuting the the the people who run the site and yeah so the legitimate users are kind of up a creek potentially except that it sounds like they'll have a way to get their data out because the people who run it are I guess making an effort but but you're kind of at the mercy of the goodwill of the people who run the website at the end of the day and this is kind of what I you know referts as sort of the unaccountable sovereignty you know and and so for instance with Amazon web hosting you know their terms of service stipulate that they can suspend your account for any reason and so when Joe Lieberman got exercise that Amazon was hosting Wikileaks you know they dropped Wikileaks even though Wikileaks had not been charged with anything and you know there was no need to actually explain why they were dropping Wikileaks and that's a more controversial example but it's it's another famous example of how these websites they operate within a you know kind of jurisdictional environment of many countries but they also have their own private jurisdictions in which their own private law is much more narrow and much more arbitrary than the law and the checks and balances and the due process of actual nations. So one last question and then we'll let you get back to your wine and be plenty of time to ask questions one on one with Rebecca. I'm Mike Nelson at Georgetown University and I am a technologist. I'm not a lawyer or a political scientist but I'm very grateful for people like you who tried to bridge the two cultures. People like Larry Lessig as well. Most people who aren't technologists don't realize that the networks as they exist today really aren't built to protect privacy or to protect freedom of speech and if they were that'd be very different that have encryption built in you'd have something like Tor or PGP that would ensure that anything I sent was really unreadable. There would be proxy servers like hide my ass dot com to ensure that no one knows where I'm coming from and there'd be anonymity built in. Do you think any major ISP is going to go that route and offer something like that. Why don't you think that's happened yet. And do you think there's any chance that in the future we'll have the kind of human rights network that would have all those futures built in. Well maybe in Sweden somebody will you know yeah. That would be great. I think you know the problem is now companies are facing a lot of pressure from their home governments not to do that. And so it becomes very difficult to actually operate a business and survive as a business and have all those features. But it would be wonderful if people could keep trying. All right. Well thank you all for standing still and asking such good questions. Thank you again ambassador. The book is concerned of the network.