U.S.-funded programs to beat back online censorship are increasingly finding a ready audience in repressive countries, with more than 1 million people a day using online tools to get past extensive blocking programs and government surveillance.
But the popularity of those initiatives has become a liability.
Activists and nonprofit groups say that their online circumvention tools, funded by the U.S. government, are being overwhelmed by demand and that there is not enough money to expand capacity. The result: online bottlenecks that have made the tools slow and often inaccessible to users in China, Iran and elsewhere, threatening to derail the Internet freedom agenda championed by the Obama administration.
“Every time we provide them with additional funding, those bottlenecks are alleviated for a time but again fill to capacity in a short period of time,” said André Mendes, director of the Office of Technology, Services and Innovation at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which funds some of the initiatives. “One could reasonably state that more funding would translate into more traffic and, therefore, more accessibility from behind these firewalls.”
The United States spends about $30 million a year on Internet freedom, in effect funding an asymmetric proxy war against governments that spend billions to regulate the flow of information. The programs have been backed by President Obama, who promoted the initiatives at a town-hall-style meeting in Shanghai three years ago.
During his debate last week with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Obama briefly raised the topic of government surveillance in China, accusing the former Bain Capital chief executive of investing in firms that provide surveillance technology to China’s government.
For his part, Romney has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for what he calls its failure to stand up to the authoritarian governments in China, Iran and other countries where Internet freedom is curtailed. The two candidates meet Monday for the third and final debate, this one focusing on foreign policy.
The U.S. government funds nonprofit groups and others to develop software that can be downloaded by users in other countries with pervasive censorship. The most widely used tools route Internet traffic through other countries, allowing users to bypass Internet firewalls as well as surveillance.
The task of keeping the Internet free, however, is becoming harder.
China’s “Great Firewall” has grown more sophisticated in recent years, with the Communist government employing tens of thousands of monitors to filter content and watch users. Iran, meanwhile, has stepped up its already-substantial censorship efforts amid a mounting economic crisis, instituting new bans on overseas audio and video content and advancing plans for an Iran-only intranet.
The online crackdown is spurring calls from Internet freedom advocates for the Obama administration to step up its own efforts. Many have expressed frustration with what they perceive as slow progress advancing these tools.
“I can’t imagine anything more cost-effective or strategic for the United States to do,” said Michael Horowitz, former general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget in Ronald Reagan’s administration and co-founder of the Twenty First Century Initiative, a group aiming to increase funding for Internet freedom.
“The one thing that’s perfectly clear is people in closed-society regimes are the shrewdest people of all about being able to define their own interests and stay in power,” he said. “And the Iranians and the Chinese are telling us, as clearly as they can, that their stability in power depends on purifying the Internet.”
Horowitz said he wants the BBG — an independent agency that, along with the State Department, funds online circumvention tools — to increase its spending on Internet freedom from its current level of about $10 million of its $750 million annual budget, to between $50 million and $100 million.
Executives at the BBG said they are sympathetic to such appeals but suggest they are politically infeasible.
The “argument is if you gave $100 million, you could really be David and Goliath, could blow a big hole and knock the whole whack-a-mole of the Chinese censors down, and all the rest of the bad guys,” said Michael P. Meehan, a member of the BBG. “I wouldn’t disagree.”
But, he said, the agency is already under pressure from Congress to find $50 million in budget cuts.
Meehan said his frustration is that countries such as China and Iran are clearly willing to spend exponentially more than the United States in what has become a cat-and-mouse chase.
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