US secretary of state Hillary Clinton vowed the US will step up support for global internet freedom, as citizens using social networking sites run by Facebook and Twitter organize demonstrations spreading across the Mideast and North Africa.
Mrs Clinton, in her second major speech against Internet restrictions, said recent protests show how technology can accelerate "political, social, and economic change" or "slow or extinguish that change," referring to government efforts in Egypt, Iran, Syria and elsewhere to restrict online and mobile media.
The US will help "people in oppressive Internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online," she said yesterday in a speech in Washington.
For more than a year, Mrs Clinton has led the Obama administration's efforts to promote online freedom.
During protests against Mubarak, she urged Egypt to unblock Facebook and Twitter, which were used to organize protests.
She praised Google for resisting Chinese censorship in her January 2010 speech on the Internet, and has called on technology companies to stand firm against repressive regimes and protect user privacy.
Mrs Clinton noted that two billion people are online, nearly one-third of humankind, and said the US supports the universal right of all people to gather and communicate online, the "freedom to connect" as she called it.
"The Internet has become the public space of the 21st century-the world's town square, classroom, marketplace, coffee house, and nightclub," she said.
Mrs Clinton announced the creation of a state department office for Cyber Issues that will be headed by Christopher Painter, an official on president Obama's National Security Council and former federal prosecutor specializing in computer crime.
The state department this month started Twitter feeds in Arabic, which reached 570,000 in its first days, and Farsi, which reached 288,000 people within hours, officials said.
Mrs Clinton announced the department will soon launch similar feeds in Chinese, Russian and Hindi.
Bloomberg