Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday identified Internet freedom as a major policy principle for the United States and urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that led Google Inc. to threaten to pull out of that country.
“In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all,” she said in a speech in Washington. “By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons.”
“Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century,” Mrs. Clinton said in the speech Thursday on Internet freedom at the Newseum journalism museum in Washington. She said the U.S. and China “have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently” as part of a cooperative relationship.
According to the Associated Press, Clinton directly challenged China, saying that “countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century”, while China and the US “have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently.”
“The Internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it is fabulous,” she continued. “There are so many people in China now online, but countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century, the U.S. intends to address these issues with China “candidly and consistently.”
Google announced on Jan. 12 that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” search results for its Chinese users, pointing to breaches of Gmail accounts held by human rights activists in China. Tens of other companies had also been targets of hacking, the company found. Google has taken a cautious approach to the dispute, avoiding placing direct blame on the government in Beijing, and the Chinese government has sought to describe the situation as strictly business.
Being the US’s chief diplomat, Clinton wasn’t so vulgar as to suggest that China didn’t need to do too much of an investigation as the suspicion is that it was the government itself that sponsored the attacks.