Washington’s Ways, Foreign Censorship Hamper Web, TV Efforts of VOA-RFE Agency, Official Says
SAN FRANCISCO -- An official of the U.S. government’s international-media agency explained Wednesday to a high-tech policy audience facts of Washington life and the frustrations they can produce. “It takes … a year to get 10,000 bucks out the door” for proxy-server technology to get around foreign blocking of the government’s news and views sites, said Michael Meehan, a public relations executive, member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and chairman of its Global Internet Freedom Committee.
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The board is best known for outlets such as Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. It was appropriated $10 million for this year and is asking for the same for next year, he said at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference.
"It’s a David-and-Goliath situation,” Meehan said of the board’s challenge in dealing with blocking by governments such as China. “It’s a 4,000-people agency with a handful of people” working on the problem. He appealed to audience members and their organizations for assistance. An upside is that “we will take risk because we're this little agency that can,” since the board’s accountability allows considerable freedom of action, Meehan said.
But sometimes older technologies work best, Meehan said. About 11 percent of the Cuban population has Internet access, he said. Congress requires the board to beam TV Marti into the country by plane, only for it to be blocked by the government, Meehan said. The way to deliver video to Cubans remains having travelers deliver them DVDs, he said.
A YouTube executive said she would pass along to her managers a suggestion that her company and owner Google develop circumvention technologies to offer users to evade censorship. When it comes to restriction demands, YouTube faces not only “Big Brother” in the form of national governments but also “little brothers” in the form of resistant companies, “little, little brothers” in activists such as those involved with animal rights, and beyond those forces community norms, said Victoria Grand, YouTube’s communication and policy director. With the central role that the service has come to play, “you don’t take the decision to take down videos lightly,” she said.
YouTube “played the most important role” in the Arab Spring, said Imad Bazzi, a Lebanese cyberactivist. Because of media controls in the Middle East, “YouTube is our only tool to get the footage out and show the world what is happening” in countries such as Syria, he said.