Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed on Tuesday to invest $25 million for developers to build tools that will let online dissidents get around “thugs, hackers and censors.” It’s her attempt at giving teeth to the so-called “Internet Freedom Agenda” that she unveiled last year.

In a speech at D.C.’s George Washington University — one full of glowing references to the Egyptian revolution — Clinton pledged to take a “venture capital approach” to funding tools that allow online activists, dissidents and ordinary citizens to circumvent internet censorship in repressive countries. If that means setting up proxy sites for online dissidents or employing tools like those of the U.S. military to get bandwidth into denied areas, Clinton declined to say, arguing that there’s “no silver bullet” against internet repression.

Since “there’s no app for that,” Clinton said the U.S. would instead work with technical and policy experts to develop a “portfolio of technology, tools and training” for getting around firewalls. As repressive governments adapt their techniques at blocking connectivity, so too will U.S. measures to help “digital activists… adapt to the challenges they face.” Whether $25 million — a pittance, really, in the massive federal budget — will really help is another matter.

Before the year’s end, Clinton said, the Obama administration will release an “international strategy for cyberspace,” outlining in greater detail the rules of the online road that the U.S. wants to see in place.

When Clinton last spoke about the Internet Freedom Agenda, she mostly implored censorious governments like China to lift their firewalls. But that was before social media fueled the efforts of activists in Tunisia and Egypt to overthrow their governments — longtime U.S. allies — taking the U.S. by surprise. The Obama administration faced criticism for not siding more enthusiastically with the protesters, and looked impotent when the Egyptian government shut down the internet for five days despite U.S. calls for maintaining connectivity.

But Clinton’s speech today took the Egyptian shutdown of the internet as a point of departure. Rather than address the inevitable tensions between the U.S.’ split interests in supporting online freedom and its longtime proxies, she continued to argue that opening up internet access is in all countries’ best interests. There’s “only one internet,” she said — a refutation of the Chinese approach to censoring online political activity but not online economic activity.

And that leaves confusion about how Clinton sees the Egyptian revolution: as either people to be encouraged through the “venture capital approach” at funding circumvention tools, or people to be feared as the wages of social repression. The answer can change with a country’s relationship to the U.S.: as protesters are again beaten in the streets of Iran, Clinton called the Iranian government “awful.” But she didn’t say the same about U.S.-backed Yemen, which also used violence to break up antigovernment demonstrations today.

The U.S. government is already involved in online circumvention. A panel assembled today by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who oversee pro-U.S. broadcasts like the Voice of America in foreign countries, recounted the use of social media tools it propagates to allow foreign dissidents to evade censorship. Anti-censorship chief Ken Berman openly discussed setting up proxy websites in China and Iran to get blocked broadcasts past firewalls, and until recently, he set up multi-user Skype chats — which China didn’t censor — to plug people into the messages of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia.

Maybe the tools that Clinton’s announced funding will look similar to those. But not everyone is so confident that the path Clinton unveiled will work. Evgeny Morozov tweeted in response to her speech, “Sure, a venture capital approach will save the State Department from the next Haystack!” That’s a reference to a tool meant to protect the anonymity of online dissidents in Iran that turned out to be easily penetrable.

Clinton found it hard to give another speech about internet freedom while avoiding WikiLeaks, whose disclosure of classified State Department cables she vigorously denounced. Saying that the WikiLeaks affair “began with a theft,” Clinton denied that there was any hypocrisy in championing internet openness while opposing the radical transparency organization, and further denied that any denial-of-service attacks or decisions by companies in the U.S. to boot WikiLeaks off their servers came at the behest of the U.S. government. “The fact that WikiLeaks used the internet is not the reason we criticized its actions,” Clinton said.

The internet culture that Clinton wants to see, she said, is one that balances “liberty and security, transparency and confidentiality, and freedom of expression and tolerance.” If your country doesn’t adhere to those rules, the U.S. may help your dissidents force that culture onto you. At least if you’re not a U.S. ally in good standing.

Photo: U.S. State Department/Flickr

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