From Syria to Silicon Valley: Is the Freedom to Connect a Universal Right?
Presenters
- Sam Gregory
WITNESS
Sam Gregory is the program director at WITNESS (www.witness.org), the leading global organization training and supporting people to use video in human rights advocacy. He supervises campaigning, training and policy leadership initiatives for WITNESS and leads the organization’s ‘Cameras Everywhere’ initiative, which looks at how to maximize the potential of ubiquitous video for human rights. He has worked extensively with human rights activists, particularly in Latin America and Asia, integrating video into campaigns on civil, political, social, economic and cultural human rights issues.
In 2005, he was lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007, he developed WITNESS’ Video Advocacy Institute, an intensive two-week training program. He is also currently an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he teaches a course on human rights and new media advocacy.,He has published in journals on human rights, social entrepreneurship and visual media, including most recently, "Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy and Concerns about Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent in the Journal of Human Rights Practice" (OUP, 2010). He attended the Harvard Kennedy School on a Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, graduating with a master’s in public policy. He was formerly on the advisory board of the Tactical Technology Collective, and is on the board of the US Campaign for Burma and the advisory board of Games for Change. He tweets at http://twitter.com/samgregory
- Clothilde Le Coz
Reporters Without Borders
Clothilde Le Coz is the Washington director for Reporters Without Borders, the international press freedom organization. Her role is to get the message out about the constant threat journalists are subjected to in many countries. A journalist herself, Clothilde has been working for Reporters Without Borders since 2007, previously at the Paris bureau. In Paris, she was in charge of the Internet Freedom desk and worked especially on China, Iran, Egypt and Thailand. As a desk officer there, Clothilde traveled to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. She studied literature and philosophy as well as political science in France and Canada, and has a master’s degree in journalism and international relations.
- Emily Parker
U.S. Department of State
Emily Parker is a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where she covers innovation, technology and 21st century statecraft. She is also an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Formerly, Emily was an Arthur Ross Fellow at the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations and a Global Policy Fellow at Carnegie Moscow Center, where she researched the role of blogging and social media in today's Russia. She is writing a book about the Internet and democracy.
Emily has worked as a staff writer and editor for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and as a staff op-ed editor for the New York Times. She was a researcher at Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) in Tokyo, where she focused on the challenges faced by Japanese businesses in China.
She has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Republic and Project Syndicate. Her chapter on Chinese nationalism appeared in China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Seven Stories Press, 2008). From 2004 to 2005, she wrote a Wall Street Journal column called "Virtual Possibilities: China and the Internet."
She has worked in China and Japan, and speaks Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish. She graduated with honors from Brown University and has a master’s from Harvard in East Asian Studies.
- Brett Solomon
Access
Brett Solomon is the co-founder and executive director of Access, a nonprofit human rights organization focused on digital freedom. Access’ mission is to ensure open global Internet access and an uncensored and secure digital sphere. The organization is working to create a world where citizens can be active participants in their future by freely seeking, receiving and imparting information digitally. Previously, Solomon was campaign director at Avaaz.org, and before that was the first executive director of GetUp!, an Australian grassroots political organization with more than 430,000 members. He completed a bachelor of law degree at the University of Sydney and a master’s in international law at the University of NSW. He also founded the International Youth Parliament and worked for many years at both Oxfam Australia and Amnesty International Australia.
- Jillian York
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Jillian C. York is a blogger and activist whose work focuses on global Internet freedom, with an emphasis on the Arab world. She works at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society on issues of Internet controls. She also writes a regular column for Al Jazeera English.
- When
- Sunday, April 10, 10:00am - 11:30am
- Where
- Waterfront 2
map (pdf) - Track
- Technology and Innovation
In a series of groundbreaking speeches, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the "freedom to connect" to be as important to human liberty as the Four Freedoms championed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs added: “It is [the White House’s] strong belief that inside of the framework of basic individual rights, are the rights of those to have access to the Internet and to sites for open communication and social network.”
Internet access and social networking have played a significant part in the blossoming of freedom movements worldwide – especially during protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya this year. But the power of the Internet cuts both ways: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turned off the Internet as soon as it became clear that millions were using the network to organize and speak out against his regime. China recently and successfully deployed technology to stifle expressions of support for Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo among bloggers and users of social media in their country. Iran blocked Twitter and restricted cell phone access just before its June 2009 presidential elections.
If we agree that open Internet access should be a basic individual right, what can we do to make it a reality? This panel will survey the global field of online freedom movements, with a special focus on efforts to help Internet users in closed societies gain open, free and safe access to the Web.
