 Welcome to Why Internet Freedom Matters for Nonprofits and Libraries, and How We Can All Help Defend It. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup, where I work to help bring resources like this out to our broader nonprofit and library community. Prior to joining TechSoup, seven years ago I worked for a decade in Washington, D.C. with small nonprofits, where I often was the person having to make technology decisions for my organization. I'm glad to be your host today, and really excited to have our presenter with us, Rebecca McKinnon, who is really an extraordinary leading voice in this topic and in this area, and so we're really thrilled to have her join us. She directs the Ranking Digital Rights Project at New America. She's also the author of Consent of the Network, the Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, and the co-founder of the International Citizen Media Network Global Voices Online. In the late 90s and early 2000s she was CNN's Bureau Chief and Correspondent in Beijing in Tokyo, and she now lives in Washington, D.C. and we're thrilled to have her. I mentioned Rebecca's in Washington, D.C. I'm based here in San Francisco, along with my colleague Ali. Where are you? Go ahead and let us know where you're joining us from so we can see where all of our participants are at today. Feel free to chat into the window. We know you can't see all of the comments that are being shared out and chatted. So if there are things that you have to say that we think are useful to share back with the rest of the audience, we'll be sure to do that. We have people mentioning that they're in Florida, Texas, New Jersey, South Carolina, all over the country. So we're so glad to have you all on. Looking at our agenda for today, I'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup for those of you who aren't familiar with what we do, and then we'll ask you some questions. So what do you think is the greatest threat to Internet freedom? You'll have an opportunity to do a live poll with us. And then Rebecca's going to take over and talk about what's going on out in the world right now. There's a lot of news related to Internet freedom, and she'll cover some of those big stories around big data, privacy censorship, and surveillance, and then some things that we can do about it, how to create a movement for sustainable cyberspace around the world. There will be time for Q&A and additional resources later on, but feel free to ask them at any time. TechSoup Global is a network of 63 partner NGOs serving 121 countries around the world to provide technology resources and support to help you meet your mission. We are doing this all over the globe, which you can see, and we're working toward the time when every social benefit organization has the technology, resources, and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential. We do that in a variety of ways including events like this, but we also do it in providing technology donations from some corporate partners like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco in the tune of almost $5 billion worth of savings to the nonprofit and social sectors. You can learn more about those programs at TechSoup.org. So on to the topic of the day. Go ahead and click on your screen. You can select as many of these as you think are applicable. What do you think is the greatest threat to Internet freedom? And I guess because it says greatest threat it assumes that you're going to select the most important one to you, but you can select more than one, and you're welcome to chat in any other options that you think are important that I may not have included on this list. There certainly are a lot of threats to Internet freedom today, so let us know what you think by participating in this poll. This helps give us an idea of where you're at, what you think, and it also helps inform Rebecca as to kind of the areas that you're most concerned with. And she'll get to covering many of these in a few minutes here. So go ahead and take a moment. I'll leave this up so that everybody has a chance to participate. Just give a few more seconds to let you click on that screen. And it looks like almost 55% say over reach of government surveillance is the greatest threat to Internet freedom right now. And another 50% say lack of privacy for personal info. Those are certainly big threats. And then the other one is corporate control of Internet. So those are certainly real threats that we're all encountering right now. So with that in mind I'd like to welcome our presenter today, Rebecca McKinnon. We're so glad to have you joining us. Thanks so much for being on the program. Thank you so much Becky. It's just really great to be here with your community. And I've known about TechSoup for a long time and have heard from a lot of people about just what a great resource it is. So it's a real honor to be here with you guys today. And just in the shameless plug department, I wrote a book a few years ago. It came out in 2012 called Ostentatiously Consent of the Networked, The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. I can't say it without using that voice because it's sort of an ostentatious title. But a lot of the things I'm going to talk about today sort of draw from many of the ideas that came out in that book, which obviously events have overtaken us. Snowden came out with his revelations about NSA surveillance after the book came out. And I sort of felt like saying I told you so a little bit, but such is life. But in any case, moving on to the present day, as all of you know from watching and reading the news, there were these horrendous terror attacks in Paris not long ago at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and elsewhere. And one of the reactions that came out of this came from the President of France who is calling for more controls on the Internet because he's concerned that terrorists are using social media like Facebook and Twitter to organize and recruit and that there needs to be more control over what kinds of speech social networks allow and don't allow because of concerns that terrorists are using the Internet. And specifically, he's calling for companies to be held legally responsible for what their users are doing on their platforms. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I'll talk a bit more about them later, but this is one of the organizations that is dedicated to defending Internet users' rights around the world. They came out with a response to Hollande's call for more control saying that this is the wrong response, saying that yes, these attacks are horrific. Yes, it is true that a lot of really evil people use the Internet, but holding companies legally responsible for everything that their users might do on those platforms is not the solution, that it can lead to censorship, that it can lead to good people, to nonprofits, to activists being also censored. And the technical kind of legal term for holding Internet companies responsible for their users' activity is intermediary liability because the Internet company is sort of an intermediary and holding them liable. And in this country actually, we've had issues and debates about this. Some of you may remember that in the beginning of 2012, Wikipedia went dark for roughly a day in protest over legislation that was being proposed by our Congress that was meant to protect basically copyright holders from piracy on the Internet that was going to hold companies liable for copyright violations committed by users. And this was the Stop Online Piracy Act, and then also a companion piece of legislation. And there was a huge online protest against this and rallying people to call their Congress congressional representatives and senators and managed to stop this legislation. But one of the big issues here and one reason why there was such a rallying call against this legislation was the concern that it would be abused, that yes, there's online piracy that may be illegal, but the laws can be abused if you're holding companies accountable for what their users are doing online. Companies are going to feel pressure to oversensor even things that aren't violating the law or even things that might fall within fair use or that are artistic or journalistic and speech will be chilled. And also there were a bunch of other technical requirements in that legislation that really mimicked the kind of censorship that goes on in places like China that people just felt was going to lend itself to a global Internet that just becomes much more censored and controlled. And so these are issues that continue to come up and it's really hard balance. I just saw that some of you in your poll indicated that online extremism is a problem and it certainly is. But we have an issue in the world today in terms of we just don't know what the right kind of rules and structures are. And I'm showing a picture of a desert here and you're wondering what does that have to do with the Internet? Well, the reason I'm showing a picture of a desert is that a good friend of mine named Rosenthal Alves who is a professor of journalism in the University of Austin, Texas likes to talk about the pre-Internet age as an information desert. So our laws about information, about speech were all designed and our entire social structure and sort of economy around information and speech was all based on the assumption that information is scarce, information scarcity. But then the rains came, the Internet showed up and now we have a rainforest and the number of organisms and the proliferation of new innovations, you can't keep track of it, it's an information overabundance. And how do you, what kind of structures do you put in place? Assuming that you do want governance, assuming that you don't want to live in a state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short and the strong survive over the week. Assuming that you do want some form of governance and rules going on, what are the appropriate rules in a universe where information is just so abundant that you can't control it? And the challenge we're facing today is a real need to kind of rethink how we approach just the whole series of laws and social structures to deal with that. And as I sort of implied earlier, now as citizens or if we're nonprofits or what we call civil society, our relationship with government, with society more broadly, with the economy is increasingly mediated. It's dependent on the Internet, on mobile platforms that in order to kind of get anything done, in order to communicate, in terms of just understanding what our government is doing, communicating with our government, we're dependent on the Internet. But how do you make sure that these platforms you're using, that the services you're using are actually being run, being shaped, being governed in a way that respects your civil liberties, that respects your human rights, that are open, interoperable, and enable everyone to participate in a way that is compatible with a democratic society? And that's the big challenge. How do you make sure that the Internet is serving the citizen's interest and not just the interest of the companies that are creating most of the platforms and products and government that's regulating it? And that's the huge challenge. And one of the examples before the NSA Snowden revelations came out, there was a guy in Germany named Malta Spitz, he's a member of the Green Party, who did an experiment that's actually hard to do in the United States because in Germany the law made it possible for him to ask his phone company, ask his mobile phone company to give him all the data about everywhere he'd been, everywhere that a cell tower had tracked him over a period of several weeks. And so he got all this data and then a local newspaper made an interactive map of absolutely everywhere he had been according to his cell phone company over the period of several weeks, just as a way of showing the extent to which these platforms and services are a choke point and a collector of all this data about you that of course you're wanting to use the cell phone, you're wanting to use the service, but it collects all this stuff and how do you make sure that information is not going to be abused? And again, pre-Snowden, in 2006, that was the first time we began to hear about what might be the NSA mass surveillance happening on our phone networks and internet service providers, a former employee named Mark Klein at AT&T in San Francisco blew the whistle on the existence of a secret NSA-controlled room in an AT&T facility and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that I mentioned earlier actually has been involved with a lawsuit that's lasted basically a decade over the discovery of this facility. And of course, then Edward Snowden comes out last, or two years ago now, my goodness, Times Flies and confirms, yes, the NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. And of course, many of you have pointed out, you're very concerned about the level of surveillance and unaccountable surveillance going on in our society that Snowden has revealed. At the same time, a lot of companies are reacting to this and are concerned that they're going to lose user trust if they don't take steps to kind of put some distance between themselves and the NSA and other government bodies that are trying to get at their data. And so Apple and also Google with its Android mobile operating system recently announced that they're going to encrypt all the data on your phone so that even if the NSA or the law enforcement came looking for it, the company wouldn't actually be able to access it. And of course, then you get into a debate. The director of the FBI has been appealing along with many other people in the law enforcement and national security community saying, well, you guys are just helping the criminals. And then of course, the response is, well, if you guys weren't abusing your access, maybe we'd be more likely to help you. But since it's documented that you're abusing your access and because we're also concerned about security for users with hacking and criminal attempts to obtain people's data, sorry guys, we're going to keep this encrypted. And so the industry is sort of in this standoff with law enforcement and the FBI. And it's tough because there are some really legitimately bad people out there doing things. Yet at the same time, how do you balance or how do you kind of obtain a proper equilibrium between the need for security and the need for privacy without which we have trouble really functioning as a democracy? There's also issues with censorship around the world. Now in the United States, we have a lot less censorship taking place whether it be political or religious censorship than in most other countries. But there's different types of corporate censorship that happen just based on the company's own decisions about what is appropriate for their users. So Apple, when it operates in China, is responding to all kinds of government requests to take things off of its Chinese app store that the Chinese government considers politically inflammatory. But in the United States, they're not getting government requests to take down content, but they're just making their own kind of decisions about what's offensive and taking it off their app store. So there was a famous case a few years ago of a political cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize whose app was taken out of the app store because somebody at Apple thought that it violated their rules about offensive speech because it was making fun of the president. And so that's kind of one of the examples where companies are sometimes just making their own judgment calls about what is appropriate and what isn't. And you don't even know kind of how those decisions are being made and there's no way to appeal them. Now I want to bring us back to sort of an international perspective here which is that I think a lot of us assume that because we have the Internet that the world is getting freer. But if you look at the research that's been going on and this is a screenshot of the website of Freedom House, they do yearly reports where they're kind of ranking the conditions in companies around the world in terms of freedom of speech, freedom online and so on. They have documented now that it has been eight straight years of decline in political rights and civil liberties all around the world. And they have a similar parallel decline that they've been documenting in online freedoms and press freedoms. And this is a global trend. And so there's this assumption that if you look at the bottom arrow here, I often use this as a more interactive graphic, but there's assumption I think a lot of Americans make that because we have the Internet that authoritarian countries are going to become more and more democratic over time. But one of the things I've been arguing for quite a number of years now is that we can't assume that actually. If we allow current trends to continue, maybe a lot of authoritarian countries might become a little more open or have more public debates going on, but not really democratized. Whereas democracies may just kind of slide the other way because you'll have powerful incumbent forces both on the corporate side and the government side kind of slowly sort of architecting law and technology in their own interest. And how do we make sure that it doesn't sort of meet in the ugly middle like that? And one other resource I'd like to point to is the Web Index which is put out by the Web Foundation which was created by Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. So he's very concerned about its health. And I just wanted to show you I'm going to see if I can share my Firefox browser here and show you a couple of results they have in their latest ranking in terms of how the US compares with some other countries. So bear with me here while I get my Firefox going and hopefully you're seeing that and I'm going to enlarge it. And so this is the Web Index. And I've got a tab here that shows – let's see here. So we're going to look very specifically – the screen you're seeing now is basically kind of all the countries on all scores and kind of on everything the US is number six which isn't too bad. But if you scroll down here they've got all kinds of different categories which you can kind of look at at your leisure yourself later. But I'm going to the Freedom and Openness section here. And the US is creeping down to number 14. So one of the things I think that we in the United States tend to forget is that we're not the model for everything anymore. There's a lot of countries that have actually begun to move ahead in terms of freedoms online, in terms of access. If you look at net neutrality actually this is very interesting. We creep down further. If you look at – excuse me, safeguards to protect privacy. Looky here. We're number 52. Again, big concerns. If you look at things like access, universal access here, we're sort of middling. If you look at access and affordability, again there's a lot of countries that have gotten ahead of us here. And so it's interesting I think to poke around and look at what's going on in the United States versus what other countries have shown as possible because I think sometimes when we get kind of in our own national context we lose sight of what some of the other possibilities might be or what some of the other possible conversations might be. So now I'm going to try and get out of this. Hang on here. See if my automatic – oops, okay, hang on. Ah, there we go. Let's see. This did not work. Let me just quit this browser. Sorry about the – oops. I think I just locked up. Am I there? You got me back out. Very good. I like quit everything by mistake rather than just quitting my browser. Apologies. Anyway, you got the picture there with the web index. But what's interesting is that the web foundation makes some basic policy recommendations and this gets into kind of what we should all be calling for here in our country and globally. And first of all is of course push back against surveillance with every opportunity. Make broadband affordable and accessible to all and push our elected representatives to make that a reality. Guarantee that all women, men, girls, and boys can access essential information. That's less of a problem in the United States than in some places but there are still issues around people being able in schools, sometimes even in some libraries and public places, being able to access for instance sexual health information or information about sexuality that some institutions choose to restrict to young people or adults who are trying to access their networks. And then more importantly or I should say last but not least, everyone needs to be educated on what their digital rights are, the fact that your civil liberties, your human rights extend to the Internet. The Internet isn't just some kind of commercial mall where you have no rights. If you're not going to have your rights protected online, they're going to be degraded offline. And we need in our civics education to better understand that, better underscore that, and having digital literacy, understanding something about how things work and who controls the tools and shapes the tools that we use is really important. And as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web said, if we don't do something about all of this, if we don't take steps, there is a real danger that the interests of those who already have control, who are already sort of the incumbent power holders, are going to solidify their control and power. And we need to make sure that power is held accountable that power abuses can be identified and held in check online as well as offline. And kind of moving along here, again, just drawing some parallels in history, what we're starting to see happening is the growth of a movement for Internet rights, for digital rights, for digital freedoms. And there's quite a bit of parallel I tend to think between what's happening with Internet rights and the environmental movement. And this is a picture that was taken on an anniversary of Earth Day, which the first one was in 1970. And it took a couple of decades to really get the environmental movement going and to really get legislation going in the right direction. And obviously the fight against climate change is still a long-running uphill battle. But if you look at where government was and where companies were in the 1970s versus where it is today, there's been movement in the right direction. And similarly, this is a battle of the generation that's going on. And here's a demonstration in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago. I didn't put the year on here. Again, this was not too long after the Snowden revelations came out. And we're seeing a global movement. This is a picture from India, a hunger strike against Internet censorship that people were upset that the government was blocking basically speech that was making fun of politicians. So this is increasingly a global movement. This is a demonstration in Warsaw in 2012 against a trade agreement known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act, Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act. I'm always forgetting that acronym, ACTA, which was going to have a lot of elements in it that SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act that I talked about earlier on that Wikipedia was protesting against. They were like, the Americans didn't want it. We don't want it here either. And they blocked this trade agreement that many of their governments had actually signed on to without consulting with their publics. Another part of this movement is a global effort to try and get law enforcement and national security frameworks, at least in the democratic world, to be consistent with human rights principles when it comes to online law enforcement and surveillance activities. So as part of this movement, a group of nonprofits, activist organizations from around the world, academics, and others have come up with a set of 13 principles in terms of if a government is going to do surveillance and there can be some legitimate arguments for why surveillance might happen in terms of catching criminals, conducting investigations, that any laws around surveillance, any practices around surveillance need to fit 13 conditions in terms of safeguards, in terms of public oversight, in terms of due process, in terms of proportionality. The proportion of the surveillance action, the scope of the surveillance action has to fit proportionally to what it is they're looking for. And this is a global human rights issue. And the recent, they just changed human rights commissioners, but the recent human rights commissioner for human rights in the UN, Navi Pillay, has spoken out on this. And unfortunately, the U.S. is not in the lead, shall we say. But since I know that there are a lot of TechSoup members from libraries around the world, I just want to give a shout-out to the American Library Association that's been very active on surveillance and privacy. And so those of you who are involved with libraries, the ALA is a really great resource. There's been a group of civil liberties groups in this country who've come up with a set of principles for civil rights and big data, and they've actually begun to influence White House policy around how do you make sure that when companies are collecting information about people through your browser or whatever it is through websites, it's not going to be used to discriminate against people in loans or other ways. So the Leadership Conference is sort of shepherding a whole coalition of groups around that. There's another resource I want to point everyone to is the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, has a great set of resources at dot rights dot org that you can browse and sign up to take action, sign up to get involved in different ways. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a really great resource that they just updated called the Surveillance Self-Defense. It's sort of a module and you can click around it. And depending on sort of what kind of person you are, if you're a journalist or an activist or a student or whatever, you can sort of click on different types of profiles and kind of click through what you're – learn about what your risks are when it comes to surveillance and how to protect yourself against surveillance and also how to get involved. But this is really again, just like we're fighting for civil liberties, it's a struggle that never ends, that you fight for social justice, you fight for better water, whatever it is that you're working towards, you're constantly having to be vigilant. You never kind of win the battle and then everything's solved and you don't have to worry about it again. And this is the work of a generation in terms of changing legislation, finding ways to hold companies accountable, demanding transparency both from the government and from the companies whose services we depend on, or from the nonprofit websites for that matter, making sure that everybody is really living up to their claims. Building movements, building social movements online and offline, making sure that our technologies that we're using are human rights compatible. That means that in terms of privacy settings, in terms of security, in terms of again equity and so on, how do the technologies stack up with the kind of society we want to have? And just public participation in technology's future. And what I mean by that is the digital spaces we inhabit are increasingly critical for our political participation, the ability of our nonprofits to succeed, et cetera, et cetera. And we need to make sure that those spaces, we need to participate in the governance of those spaces. We need to know who's controlling them or who has influence in shaping them, what's possible, what's not possible, and get involved, make sure whether it be with your political representatives or again the companies whose products you might use, or whose stock you might own. You need to be part of that conversation just like we want to be part of the conversation of how our city is run, how our state is run. And if you're not participating, it's less likely that it's going to go in a direction that's in your interest. It's more likely to be in your interest if you're participating. And so our digital spaces are the same way. And just to wrap up, and Becky mentioned this earlier, what's also kind of exciting is that since we're all nonprofits here, and we all are thinking about funders, and there was an event that was just yesterday in New York with the Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Open Society Foundations, and really kind of trying to bring a whole lot of other philanthropic organizations under the tent to say philanthropy's got to step up here, that the nonprofit sector, civil society is not going to survive unless we really put our money into this notion that the Internet and the digitally networked technologies that we depend on need to be compatible with democracy, need to be compatible with social justice, and they're gearing up to fund work that will help to make that possible. But I think that we'll also connect what people are doing offline with the struggle to make sure that our online spaces are compatible with what we're doing offline. So I know Becky's going to share all the web addresses and so on, but I think you'll find it really interesting to go on their website and take a look at some of the ideas that have come up. There's a video of the discussion that's gone on and just that the fact of the matter is just the digital space we inhabit has become as important to engage and to participate in as the physical space in our cities and communities. And it's great that the funders that some of us are somewhat dependent on are getting behind that notion. And so I'm going to with that wrap up and just in the interest of shameless self-promotion on my like ancient book that's way out of date just to say thanks again. And there's a couple URLs here, one to the website for my book where I have a blog that has some more recent stuff that I've written and also a project that I haven't talked too much about or haven't talked about at all in this presentation because I wanted it to be more broad, but I've got a very kind of early stage project where we're going to be ranking and benchmarking and comparing what companies do to respect their users' rights to freedom of expression and privacy. And it will hopefully come out with an initial ranking at the end of this year if we get our funding lined up. But that's again just trying to work on little pieces of this here and there. So with that I look forward to your questions. Thank you so much for that, Rebecca. Really illuminating and inspirational and also somewhat terrifying which is I think how we all feel about a lot of these things. And in fact you just mentioned around the ranking digital rights projects that you're hoping to have some resources ranking how companies are doing. And we have a question from Judy saying, I'm concerned about the focus on limiting government and law enforcement while private corporations, both American and foreign, can still collect any data they want. So what's being done about that? Or what can we do about that? Is there a way that we can hold people accountable in corporate relationships? Or are there corporate allies that we can look to who are setting a good example? I know that's a big question. That's a really good question. And it's absolutely true that particularly a democratic government if we can get it to actually act in our will can do a lot to help us. And in that web index that I showed, the US scores really badly on privacy and one of the reasons in addition to the whole issue with the NSA actually has to do with the fact that there are a lot of countries out there that have much better regulation of companies in terms of how data is collected, how it's shared, how if they're going to do collect or share anything, how they need to disclose it, get your permission and so on that there's much clearer regulation of these things in Europe for instance than there is here. And so pushing for privacy legislation that would make it harder for abuses to take place I think is absolutely part of it. So the government is not always the bad guy. The thing is we need to make sure that we can hold the government accountable, right? So it's kind of a double-edged thing. And similarly with companies, companies do care whether you trust them ultimately. So I know some people who have tried to boycott Facebook and didn't really get very far, but I can tell you that now that Facebook and Twitter are listed on the stock market that there are socially responsible investors who are going to these companies and saying we expect that you're going to adhere to some responsible practices when it comes to privacy and frame of expression and we want to see evidence of that. And so just as the whole socially responsible investment kind of universe has actually been influencing companies for a long time when it comes to labor, when it comes to environmental practices and so on, there are some funds that are starting to look at what companies are doing on free expression and privacy. And it's still pretty early, but the more they get demand, the more these investment funds will start. And this includes like, again, mutual fund companies not just things that require you to be rich. And so yeah, it's definitely, I think trying to influence companies, part of it is just making your voice heard along with everybody else. And when you're mad about something, don't just accept it because when there is a user outcry about certain things, you do see companies, particular Facebook or Google changing policies when their users get upset sort of in large numbers. And particularly then when the users or when angry users hook up with organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation who can then get meetings with high level executives and say this is unacceptable and we're going to trash you unless you change it. And that can really sort of help to – I've seen that cause changes to company policies in the past. And so there's no kind of silver bullet, but the good news is that there are some things you can do. And speaking of legislation, I'm just noticing the questions here, Becky, if you don't mind about FCC net neutrality. And that's another way that at least in my view and I know that not everybody agrees, but net neutrality is one of those places where regulation prevents abuse and helps to protect consumers against certain content being more accessible than other content depending on whether a company has an arrangement with another company. And so again, there's always a fine line, government needs to be held accountable to, but if you have absolutely no regulation then that can also be a problem. There's a reason why we have food safety regulation and don't just leave it to the market. And so there's a reason why we need privacy regulation, net neutrality regulation and so on. In terms of exactly where that's going to get with the FCC, I'd need a bit more of a crystal ball. It sounds like there's going to be – we're in stages of fights that will go on for some years. I'm seeing a couple other questions. And Becky, just please interrupt me if you want me to do something different. I wanted to shift our gear a little bit to some of the things you talked about a little bit around access because a lot of our organizations, whether they're libraries or they're community-based organizations or they run tech centers or maybe they're a shelter that has a computer lab, there are a lot of times the people on the front lines who are providing access to people who don't otherwise have it. And a couple of years ago Obama had a goal that he announced that he wanted to extend Internet access to 98% of America. And that was one of his big telecommunications goals was corporate America was not going to fill in all of the rural parts of the country with Internet and with broadband in particular, and that he was going to try and make that happen. And I wonder, how do we know how that's doing? Like is there a way to know how we're doing access for our community? So I have some colleagues at what's called the Open Technology Institute who've been working on that particular issue of access much more closely than I have. And I can get you guys some resources on that. But it's definitely – all of this has been just kind of step-by-step sort of political battles in terms of who gets to control what resources. And so as with many things, the President saying something's going to happen and it happening are not the same. But things seem to be moving roughly in the right direction. But we're behind. We're behind on affordability of broadband access globally. We're behind in terms of access speeds. Another person who's been doing a lot of work on this is named Susan Crawford who's currently at Harvard Law School who has been writing about this quite a lot and I think commenting on every twist and turn of the access debate as well as the net neutrality debate. But yeah, I'd be happy to send you some resources on that too. In fact, I can see if I can come up with a couple of links while I'm talking. Yeah, that would be great. And in that vein we had a question for the people who are day-to-day providing access in some tangible ways whether it's at a library or a computer center or just helping patrons, boys and girls clubs, things like that. And community members, how do you support and encourage them to go out there and learn about the Internet and experience the Internet with lots of limitations here and there? You mentioned restrictions around what kind of content they might be able to view while in a library. And David actually one of our participants asked where do you see the line drawn between freedom of access versus patron or child protection where somebody might be looking at something sexually explicit. And that is a real debate. And I mean libraries also have some very logistical limitations like we have a bank of computers and they limit to 30 or 45 minute chunks of time that you can sit at them. So how much freedom of access is there? Yeah, well exactly. When you have scarce resources and you have legitimate child protection issues and legitimate issues around appropriate content, age appropriate content and real social responsibilities around that to your community, it's absolutely balancing all of that is really hard. And there's a lot of commercial web filtering software that sometimes kind of overblocks things. So it'll keep out the porn but it also will keep out the sex ed sites and so on. And so kind of trying to deal with that is always a challenge. But I think where it comes down ultimately is that you want to be transparent and accountable about your policies so that if people feel that you're overdoing it or people feel that you're being unfair, the rules are clear, the reasons for them are clear. There's some way to kind of make sure that somebody isn't abusing other people's freedom of speech. And yeah, obviously it's hard because it's a public resource. Lots of people want to use library computers. It's reasonable that people shouldn't be free to stay on for 8 hours. And so it's kind of free as in speech not as in beer as they like to say. And so just being honest when you screw up too, as hard as that is. And I find this whether it's with companies or big institutions, not just small institutions and just sort of educating yourself about where the problems can come up and sort of being prepared to deal with them because this happens too with big institutions that they'll kind of put in a new piece of software and just didn't understand it well enough to see kind of what the downsides might be. And yeah, because how you're going to have an appeals process if there's an issue. Right, that's important. Well, when you mentioned the software thing, we had a couple of people, Sherry asked and also Judy asked that they have concerns around how do they protect themselves against cyber attacks and hackers and things like that with the increasing cost both in time and money of putting information online. How do organizations especially cash strapped, time strapped, limited resources organizations, where do they look to find out what is going to protect them, what's going to help them? Sherry commented that they were told recently that cyber attacks are not covered by general liability insurance and they need to make sure their data is better protected. Where can they look for resources on how to do that especially when they don't have the time and money and they also may not want to restrict internet freedom to the people in their office or the people they serve. Yeah, now this is again a real problem because there's some software that helps you protect your network that also makes it possible to surveil your users. So again, it's a double edged issue. There are a number of organizations and I think TechSoup is kind of one of them that provide resources to nonprofits for where to go for cybersecurity advice that's affordable for a nonprofit. We didn't even plan that plug. You didn't even plan full disclosure. That was my own. That came from me. Nobody asked me to say that. But it's true, there are a number of organizations that for more kind of activist-y or journalistic organizations and more kind of self-defense if you feel that you are going to be targeted, there's an organization called Tactical Tech that provides a suite of free tools for protecting your data, protecting your sources, protecting your own communications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some resources on that self-defense website although that's more for kind of surveillance rather than for defending against cyber attacks. But yeah, there are starting to be a number of these funders out there who are now kind of waking up. They're starting to fund some projects that are meant to directly service nonprofits to kind of help deal with the cybersecurity problem. Other than TechSoup, I don't have like a bunch of links handy on cybersecurity advice, but I'm pretty sure that TechSoup has some of those because I think I saw something on your website not long ago. And we actually have a guide that we recently put out on online security and privacy and a whole bunch of resources. I'll be sure to include some of those in the follow-up email as well. We have just a couple minutes left so I'll ask another question here. Ali asks, can you speak to any of the movements that work to empower marginalized communities or people of color, immigrants that may not have net freedom and that helps cause on their experience around restricted human rights and freedoms? How can we bring those communities into this? And in particular for organizations that are direct service, that are serving communities that may not be in the know on all of these topics already and we want to make sure that their voices are heard. Yeah, well there's one organization who I've met some of the people who work with them and for them called Color of Change. I think the URL is colorofchange.org. And I'm just going to their website right now. I'm not sharing my browser, but on the front page they have a thing about internet freedom. But they very much sort of connect for minority communities. For economically disadvantaged communities, how do these issues connect? How does big data, how does surveillance, how does net neutrality sort of connect up to communities that I think is colorofchange.org, one word. So they have a bunch of resources definitely and they're not just working on online issues, it's sort of offline as well. But that's one organization I know of. I do know that there's also, I had a slide earlier to a web page for the leadership conference and I think their URL is civilrights.org, great URL. And they very much have a whole bunch of resources as well around precisely this kind of issue. Well terrific, thank you so much for that. And we'll be sure to include those links in the follow-up email. If you have additional questions for our audience, or if our audience has additional questions, they can go ahead and continue the conversation, share their experiences, and ask more in the Tech for Good forum which we'll have a link to at the top of the follow-up email. If you would take a moment and let us know today, what did you learn? And it could be something that you're going to try to implement or something that you're going to think more about. And this is just to help kind of recap a little bit of what we talked about today. So feel free to chat into us, let us know what you learned, and one of our participants shared something already in there. Thank you so much Rebekah. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to talk to our audience about this today. It is so important and it is the kind of roadmap of what the world is going to look like in the coming decades because we're all carrying little computers in our pockets and yet have very little direct control over what's happening with the information that's collected there. So it's great to have all of these resources and how we can have a voice in it and how we can enable our community to have a voice in it. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. My father is a history professor, so I like to take the long view on life. And in the short run, everything is really scary, but in the long run, I think history shows if people get actively involved, things can move in the right direction. It's just not the straight line ever. We saw that with tens of thousands of comments being posted to the really wonky FCC website last fall. That's right. Like the most they've ever received, ever. Exactly. Never give up. Exactly. So here are some additional resources, and again we'll point to those in the follow-up email. Lastly, I'd like to invite you to join us for upcoming webinars. We'll be covering a variety of topics in the coming weeks, starting with next Wednesday, talking about inclusive information access around assistive technologies in libraries. And then we'll be talking about tech donations for religious and faith-based organizations on Thursday. Following that, we'll have a series of two webinars for people using QuickBooks to handle their accounting, both for new users and existing nonprofit users. So we hope you'll join us for some of those events coming soon. You can find us at TechSoupGlobal.org, TechSoup.org on Facebook or on Twitter. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for your participation today. And thank you to our audience for being so active in asking these wonderful questions and sharing your learnings. Lastly, I'd like to thank ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor, who provided the use of today's platform for us to present this webinar. We're using their ReadyTalk 500 tool, which is also available in TechSoup's catalog at TechSoup.org slash ReadyTalk. Please take a moment when you leave this window to complete the post-event survey to help us to continue improving our webinar program. Thank you all so much, and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.