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MR. SEVERINO: Let us talk about something that you probably want to comment on. You've called this the Age of Participation.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Yes.
MR. SEVERINO: And you and the State Department have championed the internet and social media as tools for democratization, especially in oppressed nations. Yet your government, the U.S. Government, has not been very happy with an organization like WikiLeaks that has professed that it promotes transparency and accountability. Where would you suggest drawing the line using the internet in challenging governments, including your own?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, it's a great question. We've had over 235 years in our democracy of trying to struggle with the issues about free expression, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. And the internet is a vehicle. And 200 years ago, you would go to the town square or you would work on a newspaper, and then obviously communications became more sophisticated. So I think that the rules are not so different; it's just that the mechanism of communication in the internet is so revolutionary because you could in the past say something to two people and then those two people might spread it around, but here you can press a button and billions of people can see something.
So I think you have to be both protective of the openness of the internet but recognize that just as in free speech in any setting, there does have to be a certain set of expectations. So we do champion freedom of speech. We champion tools that can help people living in oppressive regimes continue to communicate and get around all of the obstacles that governments put up.
But when an organization ' and you mentioned WikiLeaks ' when an organization steals information, which is what happened, that is ' just because they put it on an internet doesn't make it any more right than if they had passed it out on a street corner. So there still has to be a fundamental respect for and a real benefit of the doubt given to freedom, but there also has to be certain standards, expectations, rules that have to continue to be recognized. |
