>> this week on "the communicators" we'll look at how the state department wants to use technology to advancediplomacy. our guest is alec ross, an

adviser to secretary of state hillary clinton. >> host: alec ross, describe your job. >> guest: so, it's my job and my team's job to drive innovation into america's foreign policy, to figure out how we can maximize the potential of technology and innovation in service of america's diplomatic and development goals. >> host: give us an example of how that's done. >> guest: they vary in things we're doing in mexico to congo to siberia. in siberia, for example, we have a strategic dialogue with russia, and if you think about the cold war, innovation was something that we competed with the russians on, and, in fact, if one of our nations won, it was perceived as though the other nation was losing. now innovation can be a shared resource, scientific and technological cooperation. so one example of what we're doing is we're building ties between the russian government, the russian private sector and

the american government and the american private sector so that by working together leveraging each of our countries' resources, we can produce scientific and technological breakthroughs that otherwise wouldn't happen. that's a positive example of what the innovation agenda can look like. another side of it is fighting against bad guys and dealing with some of the threats that are in the world. so one thing that's been very much in the news lately are the problems that are related to narco-fueled crime in mexico. another example of what we're doing is working cooperatively with the government of mexico to put in place a technology program that allows mexican citizens to anonymously report crime via text message and restore anonymity, transparency and a little bit of accountability back into crime fighting. >> host: and the congo. >> guest: the congo, you know, this is the case of a place

that's been enormously challenged for decades. you know, i was there not long ago, and it has a per capita gdp of $184. in the east congo there are just rampant levels of violence, particularly sexual and gender-based violence, and progress has been so slow to come there. what we're trying to do there and working very hard but it's very hard to make progress is a handful of programs, one of which is to try to bring mobile banking into the region so that the region becomes less cash-based because one of the things we know is that cash-based economies are ones that have disproportionately high levels of crime and corruption. a second thing that we're trying to do is use the telecommunications infrastructure that is there and, roadway mark my n a place with that kind of per capita, there is a fairly robust

wireless telecommunications infrastructure. we're trying to use that to provide information directly to women and families so that they can protect themselves when there are, then there are bad guys nearby so that they can be less vulnerable to predation by militias, by people who would sexually, violently exploit them. >> host: is this the time at state department that this position has been created? >> guest: yes. the secretary upon becoming secretary of state, one of the things that she did early on and she alluded to this during her confirmation remarks was that, you know, it's increasingly the case that we live in a world that's less bound by vast distances and traditional national boundaries. and so one of the things that she did from the outset was create a space for technology and innovation in her office and throughout the department. and so she brought myself and a variety of other people in to

create an innovation agenda with her at the state department. she is its godmother, and she calls it 21st century state craft. >> host: is she technologically capable? >> guest: oh, sure. you know, you don't need to be a software engineer. in fact, i would argue that it actually is not to your advantage if you're a software engineer. if what you're trying to do is figure out how technologies, mainstream technologies particularly, can be used in service of global challenges. so i was a history major, for example. most of the colleagues that i work with who work in the technology and innovation space in the obama administration actually have backgrounds such that we're all technologically literate in the conventional sense, but we aren't coders. and what we understand, rather, is how to use these tools in service of our diplomatic goals. and secretary clinton is, you

know, a perfect example of someone who, she doesn't have a technical background, but she's brilliant about how to weave together technology and innovation into our foreign policy. >> host: well, alec ross are, one of the things that you've talked about in your position as senior adviser for innovation is internet freedom and, in fact, recently in a speech you said 2009 was the worst year ever for internet freedom. why did you say that? >> guest: i said it because, unfortunately, it's true. you know, internet freedom is something that used to be, you know, this little obscure piece of foreign policy around cay that, and then throughout 2009 there were a number of very bad trends that we saw worsening. in particular, the degree to which governments sensor the internet. so it's increasingly the case in literally dozens of countries. everybody focuses on iran. everybody focuses on china.

but it's the case in literally dozens of countries where the internet is increasingly looking like an intranet. and, you know, the president, i think, sensed this. in what i thought were ground-breaking and incredibly important remarks in november at a town hall meeting in shanghai, he addressed this issue head on, and one statement that he made that i thought was very important was he said, the more freely information flows, the stronger the society. and he spoke about internet freedom. and then two months later secretary clinton, on january 21st, gave an absolutely paradigm-shifting speech about internet freedom where what she made clear was that american values related to things like the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of the press, these things that we've valued for not just decades, but centuries must extend into the digital age.

and so 2009 was a very bad year because of the president, because of secretary clinton 2010 is, we're beginning to shift some of these trends. >> host: joining us also on "the communicators" is laidalia stern stein. >> host: going back to internet freedom, your boss decided to revive the task force, and as i understand it last month the task force was renamed -- >> the net freedom task force. much more modern. >> host: and shorter, easier to remember. had its first meeting. what are they up to now? >> guest: so one of the things -- the secretary announced a series of deliverables in her speech on january 21st. so in addition to what i thought was incredibly important rhetoric and incredibly important policy statements, she

put a number of programs out there, and, you know, a great many people are now working to fulfill the vision that she and the president set out. what you described is one of them, the net freedom task force. so we have two undersecretaries of state, robert hour mets and maria otero who are both incredibly seasoned, incredibly gifted executives. maria otero from the ngo sector and robert here mets is a long time executive of goldman sachs as well as i think he's now in his fourth or fifth administration. and the two of them are co-chairing this initiative, the purpose of which is to create a shared responsibility with the private sector. so there's a lot that can be done in the internet freedom space government to government, but the private sector is actually a primary actor in this

space, and i think it's notable that the secretary didn't call for statute. she actually didn't make a call for there to be specific short-term legislative action when she gave her speech, but what she did call for was shared responsibility with the private sector on this issue. so undersecretary otero and undersecretary health care ormats have now become a process of engagement so that people sort of understand what our values are and hopefully they can work with us if they do work around the world. >> host: are you sensing that there is a concern among some american companies about backlash because of this new internet freedom agenda that either the companies will be economically challenged or their employees overseas could be retaliated against? where do you draw the line

between, you know, protecting human rights and engaging good diplomatic relationships? >> guest: you went to the heart of the issue. part of the reason it's so complicated is it's a security issue, it's an economic issue, and it's a human rights issue. the response from the private sector has been great because part of what we've heard very clearly from the private sector is what they want is clarity. what they want is for there to be a sense of community standards that the they can all work within. and, you know, so it's been very positive and very productive, and i think that the companies that participated in the first net freedom task force meeting felt very good about it. the interactions i have had with these companies have been extremely good. what they want is clarity. what they want to do is work with us on what the rules of the road are and not be told or have to guess what they are.

>> host: what kind of standards are you agreeing upon? >> guest: it's chapter 1, page 1, so this is the beginning of a process. we've had, you know, one meeting on this. so it would be prults chus of me to say, you you know, what the specific norms or standards will be, but there has to be a very clear process, and what we set out is a very clear process for it. and it's going to be collaborative between the private sector and government. >> host: alec ross, you talked about iran a little bit, and we all saw the twitters that came out of iran during a recent uprising there. how can a government block technology because of all the different avenues that technology can flow out of? >> guest: yeah, so, this is a fast-moving space. it changes, you know, not year to year, but really month to month and in some cases week to week. so, you know, networks. you know, the internet whether it's wired, whether it's wireless, it all flows through

global communications networks, and there are things that can be done on a technical level to block content, to facility ther content -- filter content out of our networks. now, that's hard because, you know, there are, for example, something akin to 200 billion e-mails sent every year. so surgically pulling out content or filtering content is very difficult. so what we saw in iran was, i think, the most extreme version of this. so let's talk about june of 2009 and february of 2010. so in june of 2009, you know, there was the very well known postelection aftermath in which the resistance really organized itself over social media through connection technologies. what we saw is between june of 2009 and february of 2010 was an

increasing sophistication of the iranians such that went on the anniversary of the revolution just two months ago. and a lot of people anticipated there would be enormous protests that would equal or exceed what had taken place last june. what we saw is that what the iranian government had a willingness to do was literally close down, flip the switch, completely close down communications networks, turn off satellite television, turn off cellular networks, turn off the internet. and, you know, what our spokesman, p.j. crowley, said was, in essence, it was an information block aid. and so -- blockade. so when a government has a willingness to completely shut down communications in its country, you know, that's nearly unprecedented. >> host: and can government still do that even with the internationalness of the internet and technology?

and i say that because of north korea. we're hearing so many reports about north koreans now along the border with china having cell phones and other forbidden technology in that nation, but a lot more information is coming out. >> guest: that's right. so, you know, in the case of north korea as has been reported, you know, the border with china does give an opportunity for some people in north korea to access wireless networks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. you know, there is a lot of evidence and a lot of evidence in the public do main that says -- domain that says, you know, particularly in places where there are borders and where wireless signals don't necessarily recognize a natural border, there are opportunities for people to get information and content that they otherwise can't. but if a government -- a lot of this comes down to will. if a government has the will to completely shut down its networks, then it's very hard to work around that. now, one of the things that

secretary clinton said in her internet freedom speech on january 21st was that we weren't going to just sit back and allow this to happen. so forgetting about iran for a moment but thinking about this globally, and it's very important to remember that there are literally dozens of countries who are, who have less than terrific internet freedom records. one of the things that the secretary announced was that the united states is going to increasingly support efforts to allow grassroots organizations and allow citizens themselves to circumvent government censorship. so this is something shah the state -- that is state department has supported for a number of years but which we didn't speak about publicly until january of this year, and part of what the secretary has done is put an increasing level of investment and focus into

providing tools and resources to citizens around the globe so that they can freely access the internet, web sites of their own choosing and each other. she calls this the freedom to connect. >> host: well, let's take another example then. we have china which is often seen shutting down, as you say, web sites and preventing information from reaching its citizenry. china is, works with the u.s. in so many other areas but here google is pulling out of china and here -- how do you diplomatically create internet freedom in china and not, you know, take the government on? >> guest: yeah. so we have a very comprehensive partnership with china, and it's one that i would argue is largely positive. this is an area where we've had some disagreements, and what we continue to have are candid, constructive conversations with

the chinese government. putting google aside for a moment because i know google is like catnip for the press and it gets a lot of attention, but what matters far more than one company or even one country is how we can engage diplomatically. so one of the thing, again, that we're doing because of the president's leadership and can the secretary of state's leadership is that this is now something that's at the table diplomatically so that the united states' best diplomatic resources more so than what we can do to support grassroots circumvention efforts, much more so than what we can do in a more antagonistic fashion is engaging across the table with our interlocutors. so this is a topic where we have engaged and continue to engage the chinese, and i'm hopeful, i'm optimistic that there'll be progress in the years ahead in this area. >> host: this is c-span's

communicators program, our guest is alec roz, senior adviser for innovation at the state department. >> host: you start ised off by talking about -- started off by talking about technology as a way to drive economies. haiti, something that, a country that is fading from the media conscious -- immediate consciousness of americans, the earthquake that happened in january, right afterwards the united states worked hard to get a communications network up there especially with mobile telephones. >> yes. >> host: while americans seem to have forgotten about what's going on down there, it sounds like the american government is still heavily supporting both the telecommunications and also health care for haitians. so can you talk a little bit more about what you're doing with cell phone telecommunications? >> guest: absolutely, and i appreciate that question because

it's interesting to me -- shows how isolated i am. when you say the earthquake is fading from the consciousness of the american citizens because, you know, where i work, i've got to be honest with you, it's a big deal. and the commitment from this administration to work in partnership with the high san government so that -- haitian government so that, hopefully, haitian society can grow stronger in the future, that commitment is incredibly strong. and i think that one of the things that we did at the outset in haiti through things like a program that the state department set up through which the american people could text the word haiti to a short code, 90999, which raised more than $30 million for the red cross, that to working with usaid to restore communications to the island to the present moment one of the areas of focus has been on thinking about the role of

21st century infrastructure in the redevelopment of haiti. now, i think it's important to not be sort of a cyber utopian or a technology utopian, you know? a lot of people think that, you know, the cell phone can be a powerful instrument for economic and educational empowerment, and i personally believe that. however, there are many more, there are many other structural issues in haiti that also need to be attended to, issues related to food security, issues related to the educational infrastructure, issues related to the health care infrastructure. so i think that technology and telecommunications in particular or wireless telecommunications can be a tool in the rebuild withing of haiti, but my own sense of our strategy in this area is that there are some very basic building blocks of infrastructure that the haitian people and the haitian government are focusing on like their health care infrastructure, like food

security and what have you. i think of technology and telecommunications more as a tool to help address some of those challenges rather than an end unto itself. >> host: aliya sternstein. >> host: so how is technology a tool for facilitating education and food security and health care? >> guest: yeah, so in each of those three cases i think that most of this is to be determined. it's interesting, last week was my one-year anniversary of working at the state department, and the first day i came to work there were 4.1 billion mobile handsets on the planet. literally one year later there are 4.6 billion. over the course of just one year there have been an additional half being handsets. so it's just now that we're really past that tipping point of global connectedness.

so the challenge is to go directly to what you're saying, say, okay, how can telephones be used for more than making phone calls? and if you take education, for example, one of the three examples that you pointed to, in a lot of places where educational resources are scarce i think that there's now an opportunity for us to use that as a distance learning channel. and so we're at the very beginning of making investments to look into that area, and it's a case where the state department is partnering closely with our development partner, with usaid, which is to say let's not sort of naively say, oh, a cell phone in and of itself can be a way that people can become educated, but rather all of the kind of thinking, all of the kind of pedagogy that goes into developing any sort of curriculum, any kind of learning device ought now be applied to this little piece of personal infrastructure that people in haiti or people in sub-saharan

africa or people in bangladesh can use for education. i'll give one example of something that the bbc did which i think is spectacular. they created a program through which people can learn to speak english over a cell phone. and they piloted it in bangladesh. and in a few week they had more than 200,000 bangladeshis learning english over a cell phone, so that's an example of the kind of thing that can be done. >> host: alec ross, as cloud computing becomes more prevalent, how does that play into what you do at state department? >> guest: it's interesting, the whole notion of cloud computing, you know, taking processing power and evolving it from our desktops to sort of figure rahtive clouds has a couple implications. number one, taking us back to internet freedom. you know, where this content

lives, where the servers are now becomes something relevant to internet freedom. so let's say web-based e-mail so, like, g mail, that's the best example of content in a cloud. it now involves the state department because things like a government, you know, determining that it has the right to investigate without due process the content of people's e-mail, if that e-mail lives in the cloud, who actually has dominion over it? is it a company? is it a country? is it the citizen of the country who's accessing the e-mail if the e-mail lives on serveers in silicon valley? if it's an american and the server is in india, is it the property of the indians?

so there's a whole new body of privacy and intellectual property work that is to be discovered as the web becomes increasingly cloud-based. >> host: have those issues been risen, have they risen practically? >> guest: not much. you know, it's beginning to get there. one of the things that was notable, again, going back to secretary clinton's speech on internet freedom is it took topics like our increasingly networked foreign policy and took it from obscurity to something that now prime ministers, foreign ministers, princes have to work on. and so these conversations are just now happening. it was interesting, the week after the secretary's internet freedom address i was in bahrain, and i was visiting with ministers of communication for

more than -- from more than a dozen middle eastern countries. and their reaction to america's new leadership in the internet freedom realm wasn't so much positive or negative as it was, oh, my goodness, we now need to get really smart on this, and we need to examine our policies, and we need to think about the implications for our country, particularly in an economic sense. >> host: is there an international organization that is trying to formulate these guidelines? >> guest: you know, there are two organizations that stick out. one's the international telecommunications union, another is an organization called ican, so there are different bodies that exist out there that are global organizations that have global participation, but i have a feeling that a lot of -- i sense that a lot of what might have historically lived in sort of internet-only or

telecommunications-only bodies will now become matters of deliberation in places like the u.n. so one of the things that the secretary announced in her internet freedom address, for example, was that, you know, she was, that, you know, the united states was now going to elevate some of these issues at the u.n. you know, it's increasingly now going to be examined and engaged in multilateral human rights bodies. so it remains to be seen what multilateral finishing ora are. >> host: next question from aliya sternsteven. >> host: you said they're talking openly about some of the technologies that are acting as back doors for communications when a country like china shuts down the internet. can you be more specific about some of the software programs and systems that you're deploying? i understand some of this is

classified information. it was in the news a lot, give us another example. >> guest: i'm not going to comment about any specific technology. the real purpose here is to give the citizens the freedom to connect. and so there are a variety of ways of doing that. you know, one is to invest in technologies, another is to invest in training. so a lot is to give resources to bloggers, to help people understand what they can do to protect themselves. in digital environment. we're not looking at this from a technology-only perspective, but we've got a very holistic approach to how we approach internet freedom. >> host: alec ross is the senior adviser for innovation at the state department, we look forward to seeing the results of your work. aliya sternstein of next gov, thank you both for being on "the communicators." >> thank you.