Title:
Defending Free Speech With a 'Panic Button'
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Today we continue our report on efforts by the Obama
administration to increase Internet freedom around
the world. Alec Ross, a senior adviser to Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, recently discussed these
projects with VOA's Persian News Network. He says,
"We're spending this money so that values that are
centuries old -- that go to things like the freedom
of expression, the freedom of the press and the
freedom to organize -- are available in the digital
age." The New York Times reported that the State
Department expects to have spent about seventy
million dollars on these efforts by the end of this
year. Alec Ross says one project involves a
so-called panic button. People could use it to
quickly remove a list of contacts from a phone or
computer. He says, "What's happening right now is
people are being arrested and they are being forced
to hand over their passwords a lot of the times for
their social media accounts." Freedom House, an
organization in Washington, released a "Freedom on
the Net" report in April. The group studied
thirty-seven countries. It found that twenty-three
of them had arrested Internet users for content
posted online. Nineteen of the countries at least
partially controlled international connections to
the Internet. And at least twelve had interfered
with networks, listened in on people's
communications or taken down websites. Iran has one
of the most extensive systems of online censorship.
The Iranian government controls all Internet entry
points into the country. Iran has also announced
plans to build its own national Internet. But the
Wall Street Journal reported last month that few
people think Iran could completely cut its links to
the wider Internet. The newspaper said Iran could
move toward a system of two Internets like a few
other countries. Ken Berman leads anti-censorship
projects for the Broadcasting Board of Governors,
the parent agency of VOA. He says, "China is
considering the same thing, of basically having a
closed system that would be hard for outside
information to get in on." Alec Ross at the State
Department says "the global community should
respond" wherever freedom of expression is under
attack. "Sometimes that is in countries that have
more closed information environments. But
oftentimes, frankly, it's in countries where the
United States has friendly relationships with their
governments, but where we have differences of
opinions about how open an information environment
should be." For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
