Here Come the Black Helicopters!

Authoritarian regimes throughout the world, including China, Russia, Iran, and the Arab nations, are trying to hijack an obscure UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), to take over the Internet and give them the power to regulate its content and restrict its usage.

And the mainstream media—with the exception of the Wall Street Journal—has yet to cover it (as of July 2012, when this is being written).

The world’s dictators realized long ago that their power rested, ultimately, on their ability to control the flow of information to their peoples. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, pioneered the “big lie” in assuring the Führer of continuing popular support. Now, facing the challenge of the free flow of information over the Internet, the world’s authoritarian regimes have spent billions trying to censor the flow of information to their citizens.

Reuters explains how China “has developed the world’s most advanced censorship and surveillance system” to police Internet activity in an effort to restrict the information flow to its 485 million Web users.¹

The news service notes that “the Chinese model is spreading to other authoritarian regimes. And governments worldwide… are aggressively trying to legislate the Internet.”²

To understand the lengths to which Beijing will go to stop the free flow of information on the Internet, let’s remember that on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Chinese censors prevented the search for specific words connected to the massacre of students. Anything to keep things quiet.

Now these dictatorial regimes have hit on a new solution: United Nations regulation and control of the Internet.

Their chosen instrument of control, the ITU, was set up in 1865 to regulate the telegraph and was brought into the United Nations in the modern era. In 1988, the member nations of the ITU adopted International Telecommunication Regulations, which deregulated much of the industry. These days, this quaint nineteenth-century agency stays in business to regulate long-distance phone calls and satellite orbits.

PUTIN FINDS HIS INTERNET COMMISSAR

Then, Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin had an idea: Use the ITU to regulate the Internet. Stop that pesky free flow of information and data that arms his domestic critics and stop his dissidents from using the Net to communicate their plans to resist his autocracy. He met with the secretary-general of the ITU, Hamadoun Touré, in June 2011. At the meeting “Putin commended a proposal from Touré for ‘establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).’”³ Turning vocabulary on its head, the Russian ruler said, “if we are going to talk about democratization of international relations, I think a critical sphere is information exchange and global control over such exchange.”⁴ He did not explain how controlling information would promote “democratization.”

Putin shopped his proposal to his friends in China, who have worked ever since to line up support for crippling the Internet. The deed is to be done at the World Conference on International Telecommunications to be held in Dubai in December 2012. Russia, China, Iran, and others of the world’s worst countries are planning to use the forum to push through a new treaty expanding the powers of the ITU and, through it, their ability to silence the Internet and make it conform to their political agenda and to bring the Internet under the regulatory thumb of the United Nations.

Touré, a native of Mali in Africa, is the ideal person to suit Putin’s objectives. If ever Putin found the right man for the job of controlling the Internet, Touré is it. He studied at the Technical Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication of—get this—Leningrad, receiving a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and a PhD from the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics.⁵

Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, is, of course, Putin’s original stomping ground. Touré’s Russian educational background may help to explain his receptivity to Putin’s proposals.

And a rebuttable presumption would indicate that Hamadoun Touré was—and perhaps still is—a communist. Born in 1953, he would have been educated in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early ’80s when the nation was under the rule of Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. No glasnost reformer he. Brezhnev kept the USSR under iron communist rule until Mikhail Gorbachev broke open the nation’s politics.

Why would a young man from Mali want to be schooled in Russia? And, more important, why would communist Russia want him? And why would Soviet Russia help him acquire expertise in telecommunications, electronics, and “informatics”? We can only speculate, but the thought is not comforting.

Putin found his man!

And Touré is the person the UN would pick to be its Internet commissar—er, coordinator!

Never mind that the open, deregulated Internet has been the font of global creativity and innovation. Its free speech is politically inconvenient for Russia, China, Iran, and other third world dictatorships. Josh Peterson of the Daily Caller writes that “while many US policymakers and industry analysts agree that… deregulation is the reason why growth and innovation has been so explosive on the Internet in the past several decades, an international movement wants to give international governing bodies more power to police the Internet.”⁶

NEGOTIATIONS ARE SECRET

The negotiators who are drawing up the plan for Internet regulation—including the delegates from the United States—have been keeping their plans top secret as they prepare their proposals for presentation to the Dubai Conference. There all 193 UN member countries will meet to discuss and possibly adopt their proposal. Each nation has one vote and none will have a veto. The Wall Street Journal warns that the authoritarian nations pushing for Internet regulation “could use the International Telecommunications Regulations to take control of the Internet.”⁷

Particularly chilling is the ease with which the UN could assume the power to regulate the Internet. All the would-be regulators need is a majority vote at the Dubai Conference. Journal reporter Gordon Crovitz warns: “It may be hard for the billions of Web users or the optimists of Silicon Valley to believe that an obscure agency of the UN can threaten their Internet, but authoritarian regimes are busy lobbying a majority of the UN members to vote their way.”⁸

The proposal for Internet regulation has been gaining supporters outside of just the group of authoritarian countries that are pushing for its adoption. Brazil and India, for example, have joined Russia and China in backing aspects of the proposal. Together these four nations comprise the BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is often poised as a counterweight to the power of the US and the European Union. Vinton Cerf commented that “Brazil and India have surprised me with their interest in intervening and vying for control [over the Internet].”⁹

Otherwise, Cerf noted that support for ITU regulation of the Net came from countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia, “who are threatened by openness and freedom of expression.” He said these countries “are most interested in gaining control [over the Internet] through this treaty.”¹⁰ It has not escaped the notice of the dictators and monarchs who rule these countries that the Internet and social media played key roles in the Arab Spring revolutions of recent years.

Under the one-nation, one-vote rules of the ITU, technologically backward and tiny countries can literally force the rest of the world to submit to regulation of the Internet! And don’t discount the very real possibility that Russian and Chinese leaders are working overtime to buy the votes of African, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanian nations. These countries, often with only very small Internet user populations, may have no stake in preserving Internet freedom and may be willing to sell it out for some financial reward (either to their countries or to themselves personally).

And what a welcome move Internet regulation would be for the petty tyrants and strongmen who rule most of Africa! The pesky revolutions and civil wars could be nipped in the bud by Internet controls. How happy they would be to rein in free speech so they can rule—and plunder—their populations in peace.

(See Part Ten in this book on the status of global freedom to understand how tyrants and dictators constitute a majority of the membership of the UN.)

All this has led Cerf, one of the founders of the Web and currently a vice president of Google, to tell Congress recently that these proposals for regulation mean “the open Internet has never been at higher risk than it is now.”¹¹

Cerf warned, “If all of us do not pay attention to what’s going on, users worldwide will be at risk of losing the open and free Internet that has brought so much to so many.”¹²

Cerf said the implications of the potential treaty regulating the Internet are “potentially disastrous.” He added that more international control over the Net could trigger a “race to the bottom” to restrict Internet freedom, “choking innovation and hurting American business abroad.”¹³

Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman and adviser to four US ambassadors to the UN between 2001 and 2009, said that “having the UN or any international community regulate the Internet only means you’re going to have the lowest common denominator of 193 countries.”¹⁴

We would not know of this plan to squelch Internet freedom but for a courageous—and still anonymous—leaker who unveiled a 212-page planning document that Crovitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports is “being used by governments to prepare for the December conference.”

The leak materialized when Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, George Mason University researchers, frustrated by the secrecy of the talks, created a website called WCITLeaks.org and invited anyone with access to documents outlining the UN proposals to post them online “to foster greater transparency.”¹⁵

That those who would protect the freedom of the Internet had to go to such lengths to find out what is being contemplated is itself a scandal. Why on earth would the delegates from the United States and the European democracies consent to secret negotiations and allow the documents and proposals being distributed to be shielded from public view or scrutiny? These talks do not concern top-secret military or intelligence matters. There is no valid reason for having kept them secret. But the fact that the Western delegates consented to the gag order indicates how supinely they are confronting this threat to freedom.

Of course, the autocratic nations want to negotiate to squelch the Internet in secret. Secrecy for the likes of the rulers in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran is the norm. The last thing they would want is for their own people to know of their efforts to keep the truth from them. And, these tyrants must realize that exposure of their plans would help to doom them. (That’s why we wrote this book!)

Dourado—one of the two courageous men who facilitated the leak—explained that “these proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.”¹⁶

Crovitz, one of the only journalists covering this horrific development, notes that “the broadest proposal in the draft materials is an initiative by China to give countries authority over ‘the information and communication infrastructure within their state’ and require that online companies ‘operating in their territory’ use the Internet ‘in a rational way’—in short, to legitimize full government control.”¹⁷

The Internet Society, which represents the engineers around the world who keep the Internet functioning, says this proposal “would require member states to take on a very active and inappropriate role in patrolling” the Internet.¹⁸

Crovitz reports other proposals in the planning document:

• “Give the UN power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam.

• “Russia and some Arab countries want to be able to inspect private communications such as email.

• “Russia and Iran propose new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls. That would result in new fees to local governments and less access to traffic from US ‘originating’ companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple. A similar idea has the support of European telecommunications companies, even though the Internet’s global packet switching makes national tolls an anachronistic idea.

• “Another proposal would give the UN authority over allocating Internet addresses. It would replace Icann [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], the self-regulating body that helped ensure the stability of the Internet, under a contract from the US Commerce Department.”¹⁹ Currently, nongovernmental institutions, including ICANN, oversees the Web’s management and its technical standards.

The Russian and Chinese justification for Internet censorship—that it would fight hacking (at which they are the world’s masters)—is specious. Congressmen Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Jim Langevin (D-RI), the cochairs of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, note that “[i]t must be made clear that efforts to secure the Internet against malicious hacking do not need to interfere with this freedom and the United States will oppose any attempt to blur the line between the two.”²⁰

China’s stated rationale for its efforts to regulate the Internet is preposterous. The tyrants of Beijing say that their proposal “raises a series of basic principles of maintaining information and network security which cover the political, military, economic, social, cultural, technical and other aspects.” The government statement continued: “The principles stipulate that countries shall not use such information and telecom technologies to conduct hostile behaviors and acts of aggression or to threaten international peace and security and stress that countries have the rights and obligations to protect their information and cyberspace as well as key information and network infrastructure from threats, interference, and sabotage attacks.”²¹

This statement comes from the government that, more than any other, tries to interfere with and sabotage the Internet. Beijing employs tens of thousands of specially trained hackers whose job is to pry loose military and technological secrets from American and European governments and companies. Now this Internet pirate-regime is calling for greater “security”!

But the reality, of course, is that the only “hostile behavior” or “act of aggression” that is likely to invade Chinese cyberspace is the truth. Facts, accurate reporting, correct data, and public debate are the only acts of aggression China is trying to regulate. Indeed, China wants the ITU to collect IP addresses of Internet users so it can identify dissidents, whom it will move to suppress.

AMERICA SEEMS TO BE ACQUIESCING

As you are reading these outrageous proposals, you are probably saying to yourself what we said when we first saw them—that the United States and the European Union would never permit these changes and regulations to take effect.

But not so fast. Crovitz reports that while the leaked documents suggest that US negotiators are objecting to the regulatory changes behind closed doors, they are doing so “politely.”²²

Very politely. Apparently, the US called the Chinese proposals for Internet control “both unnecessary and beyond the appropriate scope” of UN regulation. Then, to soften the blow, the leaked document notes that “the US looks forward to a further explanation from China with regard to the proposed amendments, and we note that we may have further reaction at that time.”²³

American delegates also objected to proposals to give the ITU a role in regulating Internet content, tamely noting that they do “not believe” the ITU can play such a role.

Crovitz writes that the American objections are “weak responses even by Obama administration standards.”²⁴

From Washington, the Obama administration’s response to the Internet governance proposals has been muted and laggard. Ambassador Phil Verveer, deputy assistant secretary of state for international communications and information policy, noted that some of the pending proposals, if adopted, “could limit the Internet as an open and innovative platform by potentially allowing governments to monitor and restrict content or impose economic costs upon international data flows.”²⁵

But, in the next breath, he denied that any of the pending proposals would give the ITU “direct Internet governance authority.”²⁶

Verveer’s circumspection in attacking the regulatory proposals—and his use of wording such as “could limit” and “potentially allow”—indicates less than hard and fast opposition. And the administration’s willingness to keep secret the negotiations themselves suggests that Hillary Clinton’s State Department and Barack Obama’s White House may be slender reeds to rely on in keeping the Internet open and free.

Both Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama owe us an explanation of why they countenanced secrecy in these negotiations during which our free speech is on the line!

Indeed, as of this writing, the only statement from the administration on the possible UN Internet controls came from a May 2, 2012, blog entry by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which read: “Centralized control [of the Internet] would threaten the ability of the world’s citizens to freely connect and express themselves by placing decision-making power in the hands of global leaders who have demonstrated a clear lack of respect for the right of free speech.”²⁷

Again, what is worrying is the muted nature of the administration’s objections. So radical a proposal as to put the Internet under UN control and to give Russia and China the ability to restrict the flow of information to their citizens would seem to call for opponents to be shouting their objections from the rooftops. Instead, there has been no presidential statement or comment from Secretary Clinton, just a blog entry by a minor White House office.

Fortunately, a more robust response to this erosion of Internet freedom came from the House of Representatives, where a bipartisan group of congressmen on the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced a resolution calling on the Obama administration to oppose efforts to turn the Internet over to UN regulation. The resolution called on the US delegation to the ITU talks to “promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful multi-stakeholder model that governs the Internet today.”²⁸

The resolution is sponsored by Representative Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and has the support of Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), ranking member Henry Waxman (D-CA), Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), and ranking subcommittee member Anna Eshoo (D-CA).

Sounding a clarion call, Congresswoman Bono Mack said that “[t]his year, we’re facing an historic referendum on the future of the Internet. For nearly a decade, the United Nations quietly has been angling to become the epicenter of Internet governance. A vote for my resolution is a vote to keep the Internet free from government control and to prevent Russia, China, India and other nations from succeeding in giving the UN unprecedented power over Web content and infrastructure.”²⁹

Bono Mack warns: “If this power grab is successful, I’m concerned that the next ‘Arab Spring’ will instead become a ‘Russian winter,’ where free speech is chilled, not encouraged, and the Internet becomes a wasteland of unfilled hopes, dreams and opportunities. We can’t let this happen.”³⁰

The resolution’s Democratic cosponsor, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, added that “this resolution reaffirms our belief and sends a strong message that international control over the Internet will uproot the innovation, openness and transparency enjoyed by nearly 2.3 billion users around the world.”³¹

More and more voices are suddenly speaking out against the UN regulation of the Internet. At a congressional hearing in June 2012, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell asked, “Does anyone here today believe that these countries’ [Russia’s and China’s] proposals would encourage the continued proliferation of an open and freedom-enhancing Internet?”³²

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) said that an “international regulatory intrusion into the Internet would have disastrous results, not only for the US, but for folks around the world.”³³

But statements from American politicians are not going to derail this effort at global censorship. Only the full mobilization of the more than two billion Internet users worldwide will suffice. It is time they learned of the threat to their liberty and battled to defeat it!

KEEP THE INTERNET FREE!

How do we stop this power grab and keep the Internet free? Richard Whitt, public policy director and managing counsel for Google, emphasized the importance of a cyber-roots rebellion against UN control. “I think a key aspect of this [battle] is that this cannot be the US against the world,” said Whitt. “If that is the formula, we lose, plain and simple. This has to be something where we engage with everybody around the world. All of the communities of interest who have a stake, whether they know it right now or not, in the future of the Internet, we have to try to find ways to engage them.”³⁴

Nina Easton, writing on fortune.com, says that “business leaders beyond Silicon Valley would be smart to sit up and take notice [of the UN initiative]—and fast. American opponents are being seriously outpaced by UN plans to tax and regulate that are already grinding forward in advance of a December treaty negotiation in Dubai.”³⁵

But what happens if a majority of the 193-member ITU votes for a plan that regulates, censors, and controls the Internet? The United States should walk out of the conference in Dubai and refuse to be bound by its strictures. We should work to persuade our European allies to join us.

If the ITU enacts rules on the Internet and the US and the EU refuse to abide by them or recognize them as binding, Internet administrators and the major online companies and servers will be in a bind. They will face a push-pull that may well lead them to compromise our freedoms in order to appease the ITU.

Another bad outcome would be a compromise—in the tradition of the United Nations. Building on the model of the UN Rio Conferences, the so-called middle ground might recognize ITU jurisdiction over the Internet but restrict its power so it does not regulate content or adopt the other nefarious proposals being put forth by Russia and China.

But a compromise of this sort would be a terrible blow to freedom of speech. Conceding that a global body—where autocrats, corrupt regimes, and tyrants have a voting majority—controls the Internet would be the first step in restricting its freedom.

Since the ITU normally does not vote on proposals, preferring instead to negotiate a consensus, Cerf worries that there may be a series of incremental changes that would, together, doom Internet freedom. He cites a proposal by Arab states changing the definition of “telecommunications” to include “processing” or computer functions. FCC commissioner McDowell warns that such a definitional change would “swallow the Internet’s functions with only a tiny edit of existing rules.”³⁶

Indeed, the way the UN works is that such proposals are always, at least partially, adopted. Once a suggestion is raised and ratified by becoming the subject of high-level UN negotiations, a consensus almost always emerges. In this case, it is easy to see how the United States and Europe, heavily outvoted in the ITU, would focus on watering down the Internet regulations while leaving the basic premise—that the ITU can regulate the Net—fundamentally unchallenged.

To counter this consensus approach, we need a massive sense of public outrage (in this election year) demanding that the United States pull out of these negotiations and the Dubai Conference and refuse to recognize the authority of the ITU or its member states or its UN sponsor to even discuss Internet regulation. This is the time for us to stand up and demand an end to this process before it goes any further.

Would the United States cravenly agree to participate in secret negotiations on proposals by Russia and China to restrict global free speech, free press, or freedom of religion? No way. Yet these talks are just as pernicious and destructive of our liberties.

The Internet must see to its own self-preservation! Its users need to spread word of the UN effort virally and arouse a cyber-roots rebellion against the proposed treaty or even the negotiations concerning it. If we want to preserve our freedom to use the Internet as a free exchange of ideas, we have to act and act soon.

Internet users of the world! Speak up!