The case was made long ago, and among the most eloquent proponents was john milton and his ideas that have set the course for our own principles today. In 1644, he wrote this, give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties. Today in much of the world, that liberty is either nonexistent or in jeopardy. Let me start by telling you about two recent encounters of mine. In january of last year, i spoke with a leading figure in the governance of the internet. We talked about surveillance by the National Security agency and how the agency had cap to so voraciously into International Data networks. This was and tapped into so voraciously into International Data networks. I was interested in what this official was hearing as he traveled the world in the aftermath of the disclosures that originated with edward snowden. His massive leak of highly classified documents had revealed some of this nations most sensitive National Security secrets. Much of the worldwide reaction until that point had fallen into the category of outrage, rights activists and government officialss had deprived the u. S. Governments aggression intrusion into the privacy of citizens of other countries. Foreign governments protested that even the privacy of president s and Prime Ministers and countries that were our allies had been breached. The nsa had listened in on their phone conversations. As this internet official traveled asia, outrage was not what he heard. What did he hear . Jealousy, leaders told him that we have excellent computer scientists. Why havent we been able to do this . They aspire to monitor their own citizens as skillfully as the u. S. Government have. So that is story number one. Now story number two. Early this summer, i was visiting in washington by the owners, editors, and Legal Counsel of a leading newspaper and ecuador. They sought to bring attention to the ways in which the government of ecuador was strangling the press, dictating what it prints, threatening crippling fines, pressuring Media Outlets in hopes that they would become docile, differential, compliant. This june, the newspaper was fined 350,000 by the government on the grounds that it failed to satisfied all requirements for publishing a response by the government to one of its stories. A twoyearold communication law that provides that they have the right to respond. In this case, the newspaper had published a story about Ecuadors Health care system under the headline, 1. 7 billion in federal debt impairs Health Care System. The paper had sought to Interview Health system officials tried to publication, even sending a list of questions. The request went unanswered. When the story was published, it was sharply criticized by ecuadors president. He even question the statistics, statistics that as it turned out came directly from the Health Care System itself. Then the secretary of communications ordered the newspaper to publish a rebuttal, which it did. But the rebuttal did not carry a summary, also written by the secretary of communications, and it did not carry a headline crafted by the secretary that accompanied its rebuttal. The secretariat ordered it summary published, and it ordered its headline published, and the newspaper then complied. So the headline in red, the Health Care System has made progress and will improve even more in the coming years. [laughter] marty the newspaper now had to pay a fine for allegedly noncompliance with the law regarding rebuttals, a fine equivalent to 10 of its average revenue in the previous quarter, so the fine totaled 350,000. With each recurrence of a particular offense, a fine is doubled. It can continue doubling without limit. Fines and pressure are having the intended effect. In 2014, 4 Media Outlets close, largely as a result of this socalled organic comedic organic communications law. In short, the government will break it. The newspapers legal maneuvers, creeping appropriation, and rightly so. The two stories i told show something about Free Expression. It can be threaten from many directions, and that is what is happening. Not long ago, the worlds hoped for better. We seem to be entering a new era of Free Expression brought about by the internet, social media, and smartphones. Some concluded that Citizens Communications would flourish in a way previously unimagined, and that government, even the most autocratic, would be denied the tight control the cap them in power. This idea took firm root that kept them in power. This idea took firm root in 2010 with the tunisian revolution and then spread throughout the world. With protest in egypt against the machine regime, the world marveled at the impact of social media, how it could be used to facilitate Free Expression, how it might overcome repression. It was a hopeful time for those who believed in the liberating power of technology over the traditional too often tyrannical powers of government. Truth moves faster than lies and propaganda becomes flammable wrote paul mason in 2011. He said, not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy, but the Ad Hoc Network has become easier to form. In a book entitled democracys fourth wave, Digital Media and the arab spring, a professor at the university of washington and a doctoral student noted, social media alone did not cause the people in north africa, but information technologies, including mobile phones and the internet, altered the capacity of citizens and Civil Society actors. The authors of those commentaries also know that he the technology also gave governments the ability to monitor citizens and extinguish voices and movements. Professor howards noted in one interview that authoritarian regimes have come to value Digital Media to. Bahrain, saudi arabia, syria, they observed how democracy advocates were using social media and developed Counter Insurgency strategies that allow them to mislead and entrap protesters. Just the other week, we published a series on threats to press freedom. The security of the arab world now exploit sophisticated Surveillance Technology to suppress dissent. Egypt is implementing a Social SecurityMedia Network that allows full analysis of all social media sites at any time, a minimum of 30 analysts will monitor streams of data in both classical and colloquial arabic according to a proposal he did to the egyptian media. Request leaked media. Egyptian the question now is this, it is a big one, who will prevail in a competition that has each side deploying technology as tool and weapon . Will it be ordinary citizen and activists to circumvent and undermine and outwit autocratic governments . Or the governments that has us at the capacity to monitor communications as never before . In their outstanding book, the new digital age, the authors lean towards optimism. Authoritarian governments will find their newly connected populations more difficult to control, repressed, and influence, while democratic states will be forced to include many more voices, individuals, organizations, and companies in their affairs. And yet, they noted how often authoritarian governments will have proper weapons of their own derived from their position as gatekeeper in a world of connectivity. States have an enormous amount of power over the mechanics of the internet in their own countries because states have power over the physical infrastructure connectivity required, the transmission towers, the routers, the switches, controlling the entry, exit, and waypoints for data. They can limit content, control what hardware people are allowed to use, and even create separate internets. Regimes may compromise devices before they are ever sold, and individuals who use Encryption Software to avoid censorship or surveillance will become objects of suspicion. Authoritarian governments can apply enormous pressure. They noted that states will be able to set up random checkpoints or rates to search peoples devices for the the encryption and proxy software, fines, jail time, or spots on a government database of offenders. Everyone who has downloaded a circumvention measure will find life more difficult. They raised the prospect that countries will create their own Domain Name System. No government has yet achieved an alternative system, but if a government succeeded in doing so, it would effect only unplug its population from the Global Internet and instead offer only a Close National intranet. China, which by the way jails more journalists than any other country, already blocks and filters information in sites with gusto. Turkey has blocked thousands of sites, and its Prime Minister once ordered twitter shut down. Youtube has been blocked in pakistan, and the government there has demanded many hundreds of times that facebook remove content. At google ideas, a company unit that exists to support Free Expression, government attempts to suppress the internet falls into three categories. One, server side censorship, consisting of distributive denial of service attacks to knock inconvenient voices offline. Number two, censorship on the wire, primarily consisting of national firewalls that block access to undesirable form content. This can also include states leveraging their control of Domain Name System servers and Internet Service providers that tried to hide content. Relatively few countries are doing this right now. Third, client side censorship. This increasingly includes fishing and Malware Attacks to monitor independent journalists and activists. This is becoming a very popular technique for national governments. At the core of the battle over the internet is a philosophical and legal dispute over who has dominion over the internet, and those who should govern it and how. Earlier this year, a visiting law professor at ucla laid out the issue in the georgetown law journal. Two competing visions of cyberspace have emerged in far, she wrote, russia and china advocate a sovereignty based model of cyber governments that prioritizes statecontrolled, while the United States, united kingdom, and their allies argue that cyberspace should be governed by states alone. In the early days of the internet, its creators should not be governed by states alone, i should say. In the early days of the internet, its creators, advocates, and users argued with no small measure of bravado that the internet had superseded governments and governments had no role. In 1996, the cofounder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation issued a socalled declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Governments of the industrial world, he proclaims, you weary giants of flesh and steel, i come from cyberspace, the new home of mind, and on behalf of the future, i ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us for you have no sovereignty where we gather. The vision collided with some inconvenient physical facts. This was noted by some legal academics, including in their book who controls the internet, the illusions of a borderless world. They took on the notion of the internet as a place all its own. The internet after all relies on some fairly mundane things. Underneath it all, they wrote, is an ugly physical transport infrastructure, copper wires, fiberoptic cables, and specialized routers and switches that direct information from place to place. The fact is governments to regulate the internet, and we are now faced with the question of how far they will go in asserting control. Should they remain outside national boundaries, a high seas outerspace antarctica . Should the internet be regarded as one subject to internationally agreedupon norms . Or should it be viewed like every nations own airspace . That would put the internet under each nations individual total control. In the absence, some questions countries are not waiting for one. Russia and china are leaders in treating the internet more as an intranet, and internal system that is theirs to rule. An internal system that is theirs to rule. That has become freedom expression in those countries. If there was a spark of freedom, and there was that, it is now being snuffed out. Today, most russians get their information from statecontrolled broadcasters disseminating propaganda, conspiracy, jingoism in ways big and small. One example, after the shoot down of the malaysian airliner in ukraine, intelligence pointed to rebel troops as the source of the missile that took the lives of 298 people. In russia, alternative expeditions proliferated, each one more farfetched than the next. Russian media claimed that ukrainians shut down the plane, claimed the cia provided help, asserted that the plane might have been mistaken for Vladimir Putins, making it a target. They claimed bodies on the ground were planted there. At the time, the editor in chief of russia 24 said this, our mission is to support the interests of the state. Official opinions are determinatives for our programs and our channel. While state control and manipulation of television and newspapers is one thing, but the internet and russia had long been uncensored. That is no longer the case. Early last year, russian authorities were given the power to block websites without any official explanation. Almost immediately, four russian opposition websites were blocked. Speech was constrained further. New rules required anyone with a daily online audience of more than 3000 people to register with russias internet oversight agency. Names and Contact Details were to be provided, and bloggers would be held liable for anything deemed misinformation. That included comments from members of the public. Late last year, a new russian law required that russian users and their data be stored on servers within the country. That way russia would have easy access to information about the use of facebook, twitter, google, and other services. The russian government already had an arsenal of laws that it could use against those speaking freely. The new rules created additional risks, bloggers were more likely to muzzle themselves for fear of fines and prosecution. Many of the rules are considered vague and confusing, but ambiguity is often a weapon in the hands of government, and that is the case in russia today. As one man wrote in the new yorker, Vladimir Putin has been masterful at creating an atmosphere in which there are no clear rules so the intellectuals and artists stifle themselves in order to not run afoul of vague laws and more vague social pressure. I have only talked about official suppression of free speech and a free press, but the threats are broader, more menacing than that. Nonstate actors can be an even greater danger. Two images last year cannot be forgotten, those of james foley and steven sotloff, independent journalists executed by isis. The islamic state. Their fate was made terrifyingly clear, the risks that journalists face in telling the world what they see. This year, islamic terrorist slaughtered staffers at a paris satirical weekly in reaction to caricatures of mohammed. Then there is what happens behind walls, unseen, deliberately hidden from public view, and i think now of the Washington Post correspondent in tehran held in the worst prison, suffering physically and emotionally for more than a year. He has been targeted with phony charges of espionage and other supposed offenses for which there has been no evidence. He has had to endure the sham trial, where evidence and fairness and the basic principles of due process clearly do not matter. These are just the publicized incidents, the committee to protect journalists notes that while most coverage of attacks against the press is focused on wellconnected journalists, nine of 10 killed are local reporters covering local stories. In the past three years, violence against journalists has soared to record levels. An average of more than one journalist is killed every week. In places like mexico, reporting on drug cartels, crime syndicates, and corruption is a deadly business. Just the week of june 28 this year, three journalists were killed there. Rarely are killers found and prosecuted, and much of the world, rarely are they actively pursued. All of this imposes an obligation on journalists for News Organizations in the United States. Where, despite our own concerns, we enjoy freedoms unimagined in the rest of the world. We are able to write what our professional colleagues in other countries can not. Their lives and those of their families would be at risk. A longtime china correspondent for the new yorker put it well recently. In concluding, i will quote him. As correspondents who enjoy the freedom to write what we know, we have a responsibility to do it for the reporters who do not enjoy the same privileges. Thank you very much. [applause] tom thank you very much, marty. That was wonderful. The next speaker is also a distinguished journalist. She was born in denmark, grew up in cincinnati, Northwestern School of journalism, and then went on to a long career as a journalist. She has been a reporter and a correspondent for the Washington Post, was in new delhi, tokyo, joined the New York Times in 1995, and she has had many different assignments there covering the white house during the time after 9 11, also covering the pentagon. She became the washington editor of t