[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 192 (Wednesday, December 14, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2249-E2250]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   PROMOTING GLOBAL INTERNET FREEDOM

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 14, 2011

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, last week I held a hearing on 
global online freedom.
  About 2 billion people in the world regularly communicate or get 
information on the Internet. Well over half a billion people do so in 
repressive countries. As Internet use has become a vital and even the 
standard means to disseminate beliefs, ideas and opinions, so we see a 
growing number of countries that censor or conduct surveillance on the 
Internet, in conflict with internationally recognized human rights laws 
and standards.
  In 2006, I held the first major hearing on Internet freedom, in this 
very room, in response to Yahoo!'s turning over the personally 
identifying information of its e-mail account holder, Shi Tao, to the 
Chinese Government--who tracked him down and sentenced him to 10 years 
for sending abroad e-mails that revealed the details of Chinese 
government press controls. At that hearing Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, 
and Cisco testified as to what we might ruefully call their ``worst 
practices'' of cooperation with the Internet police of totalitarian 
governments like China's. That same week I introduced the first Global 
Online Freedom Act, as a means to help Internet users in repressive 
states. In 2008 the Global Online Freedom Act was passed by three House 
committees.
  In the last half dozen years the Internet, in many countries, has 
been transformed from a freedom plaza to big brother's best friend. The 
technologies to track, monitor, block, filter, trace, remove, attack, 
hack, and remotely take over Internet activity, content and users has 
exploded. Many of these technologies are made in the U.S.A. Many of 
them have important and legitimate law-enforcement applications. But, 
sadly, many of them are also being exported, every day, to some of the 
most unsavory governments in the world--whose use of them is far from 
legitimate. Every day we learn about more activists being arrested 
through the use of newly-developed technologies--much of it American 
technology--in China, Belarus, Egypt, Syria and many other countries 
around the world. The stakes are life and death for online democracy 
activists, and they deserve our support and protection.
  For example, Belarus is blocking social networking sites like Twitter 
and Facebook and aggressively shutting down opposition Internet sites. 
Kazakhstan, which already blocks a number of popular blogs and media 
sites, is also in the process of creating a ``national Internet,'' 
where all domestic domain names will have to operate on physical 
servers within its borders. Syria is using sophisticated tools to limit 
the ability of the opposition to organize and to track down peaceful 
protestors. China

[[Page E2250]]

has created the Great Firewall and wants to create its own sanitized 
version of the Internet that will essentially isolate China from much 
of what is happening in the rest of the world. And, when protests break 
out, it simply shuts down the Internet, as it did in Tibet and Xinjiang 
in recent years.
  In Vietnam, Facebook has been blocked for two years and under a new 
executive decree, a number of bloggers and journalists who write for 
independent online publications have been arrested. Egypt continues to 
detain blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah for his online criticisms of the 
Egyptian army. And today, we just learned that in addition to the 
already extensive online censorship in Iran, the U.S. ``virtual 
embassy'' in Iran has been blocked after only one day of operation.
  Last week, I introduced a bill that responds to the growing use of 
the Internet as a tool of repression, and to changes in the 
technologies of repression. The new Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 
(GOFA), H.R. 3605, fundamentally updates legislation that I first 
introduced in 2006 (and which in 2008 advanced through three House 
committees).
  The new GOFA requires the State Department to beef up its reporting 
on Internet freedom in the annual Country Report on Human Rights 
Practices, and to identify by name Internet-restricting countries. This 
country designation will be useful not only in a diplomatic context in 
helping to advance Internet freedom through naming and shaming 
countries, but will also provide U.S. technology companies with the 
information they need in deciding how to engage in repressive foreign 
countries.
  Second, the bill requires Internet companies listed on U.S. stock 
exchanges to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission how 
they conduct their human rights due diligence, including with regard to 
the collection and sharing of personally identifiable information with 
repressive countries, and the steps they take to notify users when they 
remove content or block access to content. This provision of the bill 
will help democratic activists and human rights defenders hold Internet 
companies accountable by creating a new transparency standard for 
Internet companies. This provision will also require foreign Internet 
service companies that are listed here in the U.S. to report this 
information as well--this will include such big-name Chinese companies 
such as Baidu, Sohu and Sina.
  Finally, in response to many reports that we've all seen in the 
papers recently of U.S. technology being used to track down or conduct 
surveillance of activists through the Internet or mobile devices, this 
bill will prohibit the export of hardware or software that can be used 
for potentially illicit activities such as surveillance, tracking and 
blocking to the governments of Internet-restricting countries. Current 
export control laws do not take into account the human rights impact of 
these exports and therefore do not create any incentive for U.S. 
companies to evaluate their role in assisting repressive regimes. This 
section will not only help stop the sale of these items to repressive 
governments, but will create an important foreign policy stance for the 
United States that will help ensure that dissidents abroad know we are 
on their side, and that U.S. businesses are not profiting from this 
repression.
  This export control law is long overdue, and thoroughly consistent 
with the approach Congress has taken, for example, in restricting 
exports of certain crime control equipment to China. It makes no sense 
for us to allow U.S. companies to sell technologies of repression to 
dictators, and then turn around and have to spend millions of dollars 
to develop and deploy circumvention tools and other technologies to 
help protect dissidents from the very technologies that U.S. companies 
exported to their persecutors.
  Today's hearing is an important moment to take stock of where we are 
and how we can move forward to promote and defend Internet freedom 
around the world. What we do here in the United States is critically 
important to achieving our goals. We must send a strong message to 
companies that they have a unique role to play in preserving online 
freedom; and send an even stronger message to repressive governments 
that the Internet must not become a tool of repression.

                          ____________________