One gizmo being readied is a kind of “panic button” that a dissident can push if the police catch up with him or her. The button on the user’s cellphone will erase the address book on the phone so the police cannot see with whom the dissident has been in contact.
The grant program, which has just been slashed as a part of the Republican effort to trim the budget, has produced software that is spreading widely in Iran and Syria, helping pro-democracy activists avoid detection, said Dan Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.
He told Bloomberg news that governments have curtailed Internet freedom in two ways.
First, they’ve blocked foreign news and social networking sites. Facebook, for example, is frequently unavailable in China and Vietnam. Dissidents use circumvention software to route around these blocks.
Second, governments track, harass and arrest activists who meet online. Tunisia, before President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s fall from power on January 14, spoofed Facebook and Gmail login pages to steal passwords. Egypt, before President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, arrested opposition bloggers.
Republicans in Congress have argued that the US should focus on helping activists get around government firewalls, such as China’s and Iran’s. The State Department has taken a broader approach—making training and protecting activists “perhaps the most critical part” of its mission, Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, told Bloomberg.
“There’s been one paradigm, that’s the Chinese firewall,” Posner said. “But there’s another piece of this, which has I think become more and more evident in the months since the Tunisian demonstrations began. Governments are also effectively trying to attack people who are activists using the Internet.”
The State Department has built up a stable of technically able geeks to help democracy movements in places including China and Iran. They have created firewall circumvention software and trained more than 5,000 people to avoid detection while using services such as Twitter, Baer said.
Training takes place through “an underground railroad of trust,” said Baer. “We’re opportunistic about going to places where people are, or taking them to places that are safe.”
By summer, Baer said, the department will have awarded grants of more than $50 million.
About $22 million already spent includes all funding from fiscal years 2008 and 2009 and some funding for fiscal year 2010, which ended September 30, 2010. The $28 million in new grants, which the agency is soon expected to advise Congress about, is from fiscal year 2010.
One result has been creation of “panic button” technology for mobile phones, which activists can use to erase their address books if they are arrested, to avoid incriminating colleagues. Other programs help keep web sites running when governments attack them.
Republicans including Arizona Senator Jon Kyl and Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have criticized the administration for not focusing exclusively on firewall circumvention.
Baer argues the broader approach is needed. “If the objective is to empower people on the ground, you have to keep them out of jail. That means they have to be able to circumvent any blocks, get out their message, communicate with people and have the self-defense training,” said Baer.
Earlier this month, the Republican-controlled House cut the budget for Internet freedom by one-third to $20 million this year, part of the GOP plan to reduce the federal deficit.