My government can go to hell!” declared the young woman defiantly. I had asked a pro-democracy activist from Belarus if she was worried about facing repercussions when she returned home from TechCamp, a training session the State Department organized in neighboring Lithuania in June 2011. We used these sessions to help civil society groups from across the region learn how to use technology to advance their work and avoid persecution. Among the countries to emerge from the old Soviet Union, Belarus had one of the most repressive regimes. But this woman wasn’t afraid, she told me. She had come to Lithuania to learn new skills that would help her stay one step ahead of the censors and secret police. I liked her style.
There were about eighty other activists from eighteen countries crammed into a small room in Vilnius for two eleven-hour days of training. For the most part, they weren’t wide-eyed idealists or technology evangelists. These were dissidents and organizers who were eager for any new tools that would help them express their views, organize, and circumvent censorship. A team of experts from the State Department was on hand to explain how activists could protect their privacy and anonymity online and thwart restrictive government firewalls. We also had executives from Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Skype.
Some of the activists talked about how the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad monitored the hashtags used by opposition Twitter users and then flooded the network with spam using the same tags to thwart those trying to follow the opposition. Was there anything they could do to prevent that? Others wanted help mapping demonstrations and crackdowns in real time during crises.
That evening I took members of my delegation out to dinner at a local restaurant in Vilnius. Over Lithuanian beer, I asked how they thought the day had gone. Alec Ross, my Senior Advisor for Innovation, was particularly pleased. In 2008, Alec had helped the Obama campaign’s outreach to Silicon Valley and the broader technology industry. When I became Secretary, I asked him to help me move the State Department into the 21st century. I myself am not the most tech-savvy person—although I surprised my daughter and my staff by falling in love with my iPad, which I now take everywhere I travel—but I understood that new technologies would reshape how we practiced diplomacy and development, just as they were changing how people everywhere communicated, worked, organized, and played.
We discussed how these tools were in and of themselves value-neutral. They could be forces for bad as easily as for good, just as steel can be used to build hospitals or tanks and nuclear power can either energize a city or destroy it. We had to act responsibly to maximize technology’s benefits—while minimizing the risks.
Technology was opening up new avenues to help solve problems and promote America’s interests and values. We would focus on helping civil society across the world harness mobile technology and social media to hold governments accountable, document abuses, and empower marginalized groups, including women and young people. I’d seen firsthand how innovations were lifting people out of poverty and giving them more control over their own lives. In Kenya farmers saw their income grow by as much as 30 percent after they started using cell phones for mobile banking technology and learning how better to protect crops from pests. In Bangladesh more than 300,000 people signed up to learn English on their mobile phones. There were nearly 4 billion cell phones in use in the developing world, many of them in the hands of farmers, market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who’d historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Various studies have found that a 10 percent increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones in a developing country can lead to an increase in GDP per capita of between 0.6 and 1.2 percent. That translates to billions of dollars and countless jobs.
However, we’d also seen the darker side of the digital revolution. The same qualities that made the internet a force for unprecedented progress—in its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed—also enabled wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. It’s well known that the internet is a source for nearly as much misinformation as information, but that’s just the beginning. Terrorists and extremist groups use the internet to incite hate, recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, retailers, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts. Criminal gangs as well as nations are building offensive cyber warfare and industrial espionage capabilities. Critical infrastructure like power grids and air traffic control systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attack.
Like other sensitive government agencies, the State Department was frequently the target of cyber attacks. Department officials had to fend off intrusions in their email and increasingly sophisticated phishing attempts. When we first arrived at State, these attempts were similar to the fraudulent emails many Americans experience at home on their personal computers. Just as the broken English of the infamous Nigerian bank scam tips off most users, the often sloppy early attempts to penetrate our secure systems were easy to spot. But by 2012, the sophistication and fluency had advanced considerably, with attackers impersonating State Department officials in an attempt to dupe their colleagues into opening legitimate-looking attachments.
When we traveled to sensitive places like Russia, we often received warnings from Department security officials to leave our BlackBerrys, laptops—anything that communicated with the outside world—on the plane, with their batteries removed to prevent foreign intelligence services from compromising them. Even in friendly settings we conducted business under strict security precautions, taking care where and how we read secret material and used our technology. One means of protecting material was to read it inside an opaque tent in a hotel room. In less well-equipped settings we were told to improvise by reading sensitive material with a blanket over our head. I felt like I was ten years old again, reading covertly by flashlight under the covers after bedtime. On more than one occasion I was cautioned not to speak freely in my own hotel room. And it wasn’t just U.S. government agencies and officials who were targets. American companies were also in the crosshairs. I fielded calls from frustrated CEOs complaining about aggressive theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, even breaches of their home computers. To better focus our efforts against this increasingly serious threat, I appointed the Department’s first Coordinator for Cyber Issues in February 2011.
Around the world, some countries began erecting electronic barriers to prevent their people from using the internet freely and fully. Censors expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They cracked down on citizens who engaged in nonviolent political speech, and not just during periods of unrest and mass protest. One of the most prominent examples was China, which, as of 2013, was home to nearly 600 million internet users but also some of the most repressive limits on internet freedom. The “Great Firewall” blocked foreign websites and particular pages with content perceived as threatening to the Communist Party. Some reports estimate that China employed as many as 100,000 censors to patrol the web. For ten months starting in 2009 the government even shut down the internet altogether in the northwest province of Xinjiang after riots among the ethnic Uighur population.
That June, young Iranians used websites and social media to get their message out during protests after disputed elections. The brutal shooting of a twenty-six-year-old woman named Neda Agha-Soltan by pro-government paramilitary forces was captured on grainy cell phone footage, uploaded to the web, and shared far and wide via Twitter and Facebook. Within hours millions of people watched Neda die in a pool of blood on a Tehran street. Time magazine described it as “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.” The video helped galvanize global outrage on behalf of the protesters.
Just five days earlier, State Department officials who were tracking the online efforts of the Iranian opposition made a troubling discovery. Twitter was planning to shut down its global service for preplanned maintenance at a time that would be the middle of the day in Tehran. Jared Cohen, a twenty-seven-year-old member of our Policy Planning Staff, had contacts at Twitter. In April he had organized a trip to Baghdad for Jack Dorsey, one of the cofounders of the company, and other technology executives. He quickly reached out to alert Dorsey to the disruption the shutdown could cause to Iranian activists. As a result Twitter delayed its maintenance until the middle of the following night. In a blog post the company noted the reason for the delay was “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.”
But the Iranian government also proved adept at using these new technological tools for its own purposes. Their Revolutionary Guard stalked protest leaders by tracking their online profiles. When some Iranians living overseas posted criticism of the regime, their family members in Iran were singled out for punishment. The authorities eventually shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. They also relied on more conventional means of intimidation and terror. In the face of the brutal crackdown, the protests crumbled.
I was appalled by what happened in Iran and by the persecution of online activists in authoritarian states all over the world. I turned to Dan Baer, our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor whom I had recruited from Georgetown, where he was a professor researching and teaching about the intersection between ethics, economics, and human rights. I asked Dan to work with Alec and his team to find ways we could help. They told me there were powerful emerging technologies we could fund that would help dissidents circumvent government surveillance and censorship. Our investments could play a pivotal role in taking such tools to scale and making them accessible to the activists who needed them most. But there was a catch: Criminals and hackers could also use these tools to avoid detection. Our own intelligence and law enforcement agencies would have a hard time keeping up. Could we be opening up a Pandora’s box of illicit online activity? Was it worth the risk to empower and protect the activists?
I took those concerns seriously. The implications for our national security were real. It was not an easy call. But I decided that striking a blow for free expression and association around the world was worth the risk. Criminals would always find ways of exploiting new technologies; that was no reason to sit on our hands. I gave the green light to move ahead. Our team got to work, and by the time I visited Lithuania in 2011, we had invested more than $45 million in tools to help keep dissidents safe online and trained more than five thousand activists worldwide, who turned around and trained thousands more. We worked with designers to create new apps and devices, such as a panic button that a protester could press on a phone that would signal to friends that he or she was being arrested, while simultaneously erasing all of their personal contacts.
This technology agenda was part of efforts to adapt the State Department and U.S. foreign policy to the 21st century. During the transition period before I became Secretary, I read an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs titled “America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Her concept of networks keyed off the architecture of the internet, but it was bigger than that. It had to do with all the ways people were organizing themselves in the 21st century, collaborating, communicating, trading, even fighting. In this networked world, she explained, diverse and cosmopolitan societies would have significant advantages over homogeneous and closed societies. They’d be better positioned to take advantage of expanding commercial, cultural, and technological networks and capitalize on the opportunities presented by global interdependence. This was good news, she argued, for the United States, with our multicultural, creative, hyperconnected population.
In 2009, more than 55 million Americans were immigrants or the children of immigrants. These first- or second-generation Americans were valuable links back to their home countries and also significant contributors to our own country’s economic, cultural, and political life. Immigration helped keep the U.S. population young and dynamic at a time when many of our partners and competitors were aging. Russia, in particular, faced what President Putin himself has called a “demographic crisis.” Even China, because of its “One Child Policy,” was headed toward a demographic cliff. I only wish that the bipartisan bill passed in the Senate in 2013 reforming our immigration laws could pass the House.
While I maintained a healthy respect for traditional forms of power, I agreed with Anne-Marie’s analysis of America’s comparative advantage in a networked world. Here was an answer to all the hand-wringing about decline that was rooted in both America’s oldest traditions and our newest innovations. I asked Anne-Marie to take a leave from Princeton and join me at the State Department as Director of Policy Planning, our internal think tank. She also helped lead a top-to-bottom review of the State Department and USAID that we called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. It was inspired by the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which I became familiar with as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and it aimed to map out exactly how we would put smart power into practice and use what I started calling “21st-Century Statecraft.” This included harnessing new technologies, public-private partnerships, diaspora networks, and other new tools, and it soon carried us into fields beyond traditional diplomacy, especially energy and economics.
The State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs established a digital division to amplify our messaging across a wide range of platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Google+. By 2013 more than 2.6 million Twitter users followed 301 official feeds in eleven languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu. I encouraged our diplomats at embassies around the world to develop their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, to go on local TV, and to engage in every other way they could. Just as important, I wanted them to listen to what people in their countries were saying, including on social media. In an era in which security concerns often limited contact with foreign citizens, social media offered a way to hear from the people directly, even in relatively closed societies. More than 2 billion people were now online, nearly a third of humankind. The internet had become the public space of the 21st century, the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, and coffeehouse, so America’s diplomats needed to be there, too.
When Mike McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford and a Russia expert at the National Security Council, was preparing to move to Moscow as our new Ambassador, I told him that he’d have to find creative ways to get around government obstacles and communicate directly with the Russian people. “Mike, remember these three things,” I said, “be strong, engage beyond the elites, and don’t be afraid to use every technology you can to reach more people.” Mike soon found himself harassed and vilified by the Kremlin-controlled media. I made a point of calling him on an open line one night and, speaking very clearly so all the eavesdropping Russian spies could hear, I told him what a good job he was doing.
Mike became an avid user of social media, eventually attracting more than seventy thousand followers on Twitter and becoming one of Russia’s ten most influential online voices, based on numbers of mentions by other users and readership. Many Russians knew him primarily as @McFaul, and they were intrigued by his surprising candor and willingness to mix it up with all comers. In between explaining U.S. policies and shining a spotlight on some of the Kremlin’s abuses, Mike posted a steady diet of personal thoughts and photos. Russians got to see the U.S. Ambassador as a human being, enjoying the Bolshoi Ballet, showing visiting relatives around Red Square, and recovering from a broken finger injured in a basketball game. In one official meeting not long after that incident, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asked about Mike’s hand. When he began to tell the story behind the injury, Medvedev just waved him off. “I know all about it,” he said. “I read about it on the internet.”
Early in his tenure Mike got into a heated back-and-forth on Twitter with the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who has more than 250,000 followers, chimed in with a tweet of his own: “I see that Russia MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] has launched a twitter-war against US Ambassador @McFaul,” he wrote. “That’s the new world—followers instead of nukes. Better.” I think Mike would be the first to agree.
If the hyperconnectivity of the networked world played to America’s strengths and offered opportunities to exercise smart power to advance our interests, it also presented significant new challenges to our security and our values.
This became painfully apparent in November 2010, when the online organization WikiLeaks and several media outlets around the world began publishing the first of more than 250,000 stolen State Department cables, many of which contained sensitive observations and intelligence from our diplomats in the field.
A junior military intelligence officer stationed in Iraq, Private Bradley Manning, downloaded the secret cables from a Department of Defense computer and gave them to WikiLeaks and its Australian leader, Julian Assange. Some celebrated Manning and Assange as champions of transparency who were carrying on a noble tradition of exposing government wrongdoing, comparing them to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. I didn’t see it that way. As I said at the time, people of good faith understand the need for sensitive diplomatic communications, to protect both the national interest and the global common interest. Every country, including the United States, must be able to have candid conversations about the people and nations with whom they deal. And the thousands of stolen cables generally showed America’s diplomats doing their jobs well, often in difficult circumstances.
The cables also provided intriguing color. For instance, one discussed a diplomat’s meeting with a Central Asian Minister who showed up drunk to a meeting, “slouching back in his chair and slurring all kinds of Russian participles,” while another described the scene at a wedding in Dagestan, Russia, where guests threw $100 bills at child dancers as a “microcosm of the social and political relations of the North Caucasus.” Diplomats often provided insight into world leaders, such as one cable on the Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe that noted “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”
The publication of these reports had the unintended consequence of showing how hard our Foreign Service officers were working, and what keen observers and talented writers many of them were. But some of the unvarnished comments also damaged relationships our diplomats had carefully built over many years. Our diplomats routinely reported on conversations with human rights activists and dissidents, business leaders, even officials of foreign governments who could face persecution and retribution if their names became public.
In the immediate aftermath of the leaks I condemned the illegal disclosure of classified information. “It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems,” I said. Then I turned to face the diplomatic fallout from aggrieved allies and outraged partners.
I asked Under Secretary of State for Management Pat Kennedy to set up a task force to analyze the leaks cable by cable and determine exactly what information was compromised and the consequences of those disclosures to our interests, our personnel, and our partners. We rushed to develop a process to identify at-risk sources and, if needed, help them get to safety.
On the night before Thanksgiving 2010, I started making what would be dozens of calls from my house in Chappaqua. First up was my friend Kevin Rudd, the Australian Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister. We began with a discussion of our usual topics of interest, led by North Korea. “The other point I want to raise is WikiLeaks,” I told him. Our Ambassador to Australia had already briefed Rudd that some of our confidential discussions about the region, including China’s activities, might have been compromised. In response the Australian government had established their own task force to deal with the situation. “It could be a real problem,” he said. “It’s a dreadful fallout,” I agreed. “We deeply regret it and feel blind-sided.” I promised to do all we could to help with the damage control.
It would be a long Thanksgiving holiday, working the phones and offering apologies. Over the coming days I spoke with many Foreign Ministers, one Prime Minister, and one President. These calls covered other issues as well, but in every conversation I explained the impending release of the secret cables and asked for their understanding. Some were angry and hurt; others saw an opportunity to gain leverage with the United States and tried to exploit it. But most were gracious. “I appreciate that you called yourself,” said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang was consolatory, saying, “I can’t predict the reaction of the public, but it’s important for both sides to deepen mutual trust. That’s the magic word for the China-U.S. bilateral relationship.” One leader even joked, “You should see what we say about you.”
The in-person conversations were harder. In the first week of December I attended a summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Astana, Kazakhstan, along with many other world leaders. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister whose antics described in a number of leaked cables were now being ridiculed on the front pages of Italian newspapers, was especially upset. “Why are you saying these things about me?” he asked when we sat down together. “America has no better friend,” he insisted. “You know me, I know your family.” He launched into an impassioned story about how his father used to take him to the graveyards of American soldiers who had sacrificed on behalf of Italy. “I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. Berlusconi was no stranger to bad publicity, as bulging files of scandalous press clippings could attest. But the way he was regarded by his peers, and by the United States in particular, mattered a great deal to him. And this was embarrassing.
I apologized, yet again. No one wished these words had stayed secret more than I did. Understandably that wasn’t enough to assuage him. He asked me to stand with him in front of the cameras and offer a strong statement about the importance of the U.S.-Italian relationship, which I did. For all of Berlusconi’s foibles, he genuinely loved America. Italy was also a key NATO ally whose support we needed around the world, including in the upcoming military campaign in Libya. So I did everything I could to reestablish a measure of trust and respect.
Eventually my team and I reached nearly every leader mentioned prominently in a secret cable. Our full-court press seemed to minimize the lasting harm. And in some cases the honesty of our apology may even have added new depth to some relationships. Others were beyond repair.
In Libya, Ambassador Gene Cretz’s searing reports on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi made him persona non grata in Tripoli. He was even threatened by some of Qaddafi’s thugs, prompting me to recall him to the United States for his own safety. In neighboring Tunisia it was the dictator who had to flee. The publication of secret U.S. reports about the corruption of the regime helped fuel growing popular frustration that eventually blossomed into a revolution that chased Ben Ali from office.
In the end the diplomatic fallout from WikiLeaks was bad, but not crippling; however, it did foreshadow another, much more serious breach of a far different nature, which occurred after I left office. Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), which is chiefly responsible for monitoring foreign communications, stole a massive batch of highly secret files and passed them to journalists. Snowden fled first to Hong Kong and then to Russia, which granted him asylum. His leaks revealed some of America’s most sensitive classified intelligence programs. There was outrage around the world that the United States allegedly was monitoring the personal cell phone calls of partners such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. There was also concern that terrorists and criminals would change their own communications practices now that they knew more about the sources and methods used by the U.S. intelligence community.
Most of the attention back home, however, focused on how various NSA data collection programs might affect American citizens. In particular, scrutiny focused on the bulk collection of telephone records, not the content of the conversations or the identities of callers but a database of phone numbers, and the time and duration of calls, that could be examined if there was a reasonable suspicion that a particular number was associated with terrorism. President Obama has since called on Congress to implement a number of reforms so the government will no longer keep such data.
While continuing to defend the need for foreign surveillance and intelligence operations, the President welcomed a public debate about how to balance security, liberty, and privacy a dozen years after 9/11. It’s hard to imagine similar conversations taking place in Russia or China. Ironically, just a few weeks before the Snowden story hit, the President had given a major speech about national security policy in which he said, “With a decade of experience now to draw from, this is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions—about the nature of today’s threats and how we should confront them. . . . The choices we make about war can impact—in sometimes unintended ways—the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends.”
Living in the public eye for so many years has given me a deep appreciation of privacy and the need to protect it. And although the technologies at issue are new, the challenge of balancing liberty and security is not. Way back in 1755 Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” With liberty and security, it’s not that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact I believe they make each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to safeguard our freedoms, but not so much (or so little) as to endanger them.
As Secretary of State I focused on protecting privacy, security, and liberty on the internet. In January 2010 Google announced that it had discovered Chinese authorities trying to break into the Gmail accounts of dissidents. The company said it would respond by rerouting Chinese traffic to its Hong Kong servers outside the “Great Firewall.” The government in Beijing reacted with anger. Suddenly we were in the middle of a whole new kind of international incident.
For some time I had been working on a speech staking out America’s commitment to internet freedom; now it seemed more important than ever to sound the alarm about online repression. On January 21, 2010, I went to the Newseum, a high-tech Washington museum on the history and future of journalism, and made the case for the “freedom to connect.” I argued that the same rights we cherished in our homes and public squares—to assemble, to speak, to innovate, to advocate—existed online. For Americans, this idea was rooted in the First Amendment, whose words were carved in fifty tons of Tennessee marble on the front of the Newseum. But the freedom to connect was not just an American value. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights confirms that all people everywhere have the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
I wanted to put nations like China, Russia, and Iran on notice that the United States would promote and defend an internet where people’s rights are protected and that is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work. We would oppose attempts to restrict access or to rewrite the international rules governing the structure of the internet, and would support activists and innovators trying to subvert repressive firewalls. Some of these countries wanted to replace the multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance established in the 1990s, which brings together governments, the private sector, foundations, and citizens, and supports the free flow of information within a single global network, and instead centralize control in the hands of governments alone. They wanted each government to be able to make its own rules, creating national barriers in cyberspace. This approach would be disastrous for internet freedom and commerce. I directed our diplomats to push back against these attempts in every forum, no matter how small.
The speech caused a stir, especially online. Human Rights Watch called it “groundbreaking.” I certainly hoped that we had begun a conversation that would change how people thought about freedom on the internet. Most of all, I wanted to make sure that the United States was leading the way on the frontiers of human rights in the 21st century, just as we had in the 20th.