Trump's Un-American Failure to Protect Internet Freedom

It’s the product of a much deeper issue: the failure of promoting internet freedom under President Trump.

More countries are following the dictator’s model for the internet, but under the current administration, the US is doing alarmingly little about it.

The Bush and Obama administrations promoted and defended online freedom in a vision of global internet access, albeit with their own setbacks and miscalculations.

The Trump administration has gutted vital diplomatic organs, from USAID funding to the State Department’s cyber-focused work, creating a leadership vacuum—one which authoritarian governments are stepping in to fill.

Dictators are increasingly defining the future of the internet, undermining its once global and open form in favor of digital state control meshed with harsh offline coercion.

Growing internet repression, coupled with the increasingly publicized harms of a largely unregulated US tech sector, necessitates a reinvigoration of American leadership for global internet freedom.

“I was interested in these questions purely in the abstract,” Edelman says, “and they became real and concrete right in front of me as the years went on.” Which is precisely how he found himself at the State Department in 2008 in its early days of cyber.

In the early days, Edelman and the State Department focused on making “cyber diplomacy” a reality.

Day-to-day, the conduct of digital diplomacy was a mix of activities: Distilling internet policy for busy diplomats with many other items top-of-agenda.

They did this using a diverse toolkit: asking other countries questions about cybersecurity, advancing dialogs about online freedom, explaining US policy, and deliberately investing in relationships.

Before long, soon after Edelman left for the White House National Security Council in 2010, the State Department made technology issues the specific focus of a new diplomatic office.

The Cyberspace Policy Review conducted at the beginning of the Obama administration included “a recommendation that we really step up our game diplomatically,” says Chris Painter, who participated in the review and who, from that directive, established the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues in 2011.

For whatever derision that dismissed internet policy as niche, the geopolitical ramifications—from protest and oppression to surveillance and commerce—would only become starker.

“The key thing was signaling that this was not just this technical issue that people often thought of it as—this kind of boutique issue—but a real foreign policy issue, one that you don’t need to be a coder to understand.” Painter noted the Obama administration’s work on cyber-enabled theft of trade secrets, tackled in a 2015 agreement with the Chinese government, as emblematic of this strategy.

Painter’s portfolio included engagement across the US diplomatic apparatus, from the State Department to the White House, from human rights to counterterrorism.

By extension of the internet’s global reach and of Washington’s focus on digital affairs, embassies work on similar questions.

Diplomats posted abroad might engage with local officials on capacity-building, such as helping build out domestic cybercrime-fighting, or coordinate internet freedom initiatives with allies and partners in the United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, and South Africa.

All told, diplomatic work on internet challenges—topics with real effects on politics, economics, and security, from online censorship to cyber-enabled trade secret theft—marked an evolving government recognition of their import.

By the time Edelman was at the White House, “these issues were occupying the agenda of the [National Security Council] Deputies Committee on a very regular basis.” Far from inevitable, it was an intentional bolstering of global work on internet issues—as the internet in other spots on the globe looked increasingly different than that in the United States.

When she first launched My Stealthy Freedom, a state propaganda outlet lied that she had been raped by three men in London.

While studying physics at Sharif University in the mid-90s, he was an early adopter of email—back in the days of basic text editors, web browsers like Netscape and Lynx, and use of the full phrase “electronic mail.” Online message-sending was then cutting-edge, the nation’s internet quite open.

In today’s environment, though, global support for internet freedom in the country is declining, as authorities lean even more heavily on the Iranian internet and cast an even greater shadow over speech and activism in the country.

Not to mention blatantly repressive tactics like shutting down the internet amid protest and threatening and detaining those who rebut state propaganda.

The US, the UK, Spain, South Korea, Poland, Japan, and many other historical defenders of internet freedom voted no.

The more that hard power became preferable to olive branches and that military services became preferable to diplomatic civil servants, the less the US government has funded the State Department.

Nonetheless, the Bush and Obama administrations made at least some commitment to the cause on the digital front—like vocally advocating for global internet freedom, so citizens can read the BBC or politically organize on community-run blogs.

The White House continues ramping up military spending while slashing the budget for the State Department and organizations like the US Agency for International Development, which itself works on technology issues.

Lowering the influence of the State Department cyber office.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

When he worked alongside many other officials on US internet diplomacy, “it was as much the high-profile events that you read about as it was the hard, grinding, unglamorous but incredibly important work of our outrageously dedicated civil servants and foreign service officers.” Hence why “the hollowing out of the US foreign service will do untold damage to US diplomatic interests broadly, but at least as significant, if not outsized, damage to US internet policy.”.

“For every one of those episodes where we see the US hamstrung and embarrassed in its current form,” Edelman says, “there must be ten or twenty episodes happening at the level of day-to-day diplomacy, because our diplomats either aren’t given license to engage or in many cases aren’t even there to do the work because their leadership has prevented them from doing the service.”.

The Chinese government is dumping cash into the global capacity-building Belt and Road Initiative and other programs to promote Chinese technology and, in many cases, the authoritarian, state-controlling version of the internet preferred by officials in Beijing.

Tides may be changing on some issues—for example, the Indian government is weighing a ban on Huawei, a decision for which the Trump administration could have only hoped on its India trip in February—but that isn’t due to any improvement in diplomatic advocacy on a free and open internet.

“The Trump administration’s internet policy is right out of China’s playbook.

“This notion that the technology itself would be democratizing” without broader political work and regulation of profit-driven internet companies “has been adhered to for too long, both in Washington and in Silicon Valley, and maybe because of the revolving doors between them.” Globally, “it’s hard to defend values and interests if you cannot articulate them in your own legislature in a model in a set of rules and regulations.”.

For the billions of people who have enjoyed a relatively free and global internet—one that serves as a powerful tool for social organization and communication, even alongside the harms that come with profit-driven development—it’s a pivotal moment, with authoritarians pouring money into promoting their internet model as the Trump administration abandons years of leadership.

For all its problems—disinformation, hate speech, corporate-fueled surveillance, and more—the relatively free and global internet has enabled that communication and connection and expression.

First is reinvigorating funding and resources for the State Department to work on digital issues.

The internet is transnational, and its effects on economics, politics, and security are as well—demonstrated from the Russian attack on Estonia in 2007 to the Arab Spring movements to Russia’s exploitation of an open internet ecosystem in Europe and the United States.

Complete reversion to the status quo of pre-Trump internet diplomacy isn’t the best way forward, either.

“You don’t need the President’s attention all the time, to be sure,” he adds, recalling his time at the State Department, “but it has to be one of the priorities for any administration to make progress.” India, Australia, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and countries across the European Union are just some with whom the United States might diplomatically engage on promoting and protecting a democratic internet.

Export controls are another area in need of work, as US companies are continually caught selling internet surveillance technologies to human rights abusers—the kinds Russia and China use to capture online dissidents, or the kinds used by Philippines dictator Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal police force.

David Edelman referenced, is not a democratic approach; the United States must promote internet freedom at home, too.

Schaake offers that “we don’t just see an authoritarian model and a democratic model” for the internet, “but we basically see a privatized governance model in much of the democratic world when it comes to technology.” Building a democratic model for technology, she says, including on the internet freedom issues that impact billions of internet users every day, is part of the solution to an underregulated space and growing internet divergence among democracies.

Ultimately, as Mehdi Yahyanejad put it with respect to US government funding for censorship circumvention tools, “politicians who make such decisions need to be convinced this is an important issue.” American investment in the people and the resources to protect and promote freedom on the global internet has yielded enormous benefits.

Fighting an increasingly authoritarian-looking global internet thus comes back to political will—and the United States government’s belief that a global democratic internet, and the diplomats required to advocate for it, are a true foreign policy priority