Debate Motion : Actively circumventing Internet censorship is a legitimate foreign policy tool

Censorship and internet filtering has been increasing over the last few years. While democratic countries also filter the internet authoritarian regimes in particular feel that they need to censor the internet in order to keep the internet as ordered and stable as they aim to make their society. Censorship of the internet has been increasing over the last few years with methods of control becoming more sophisticated. ¹

With the cyber realm increasingly seen as a place of conflict, as shown by the United States military building up its cyber command and threatening that it would retaliate against cyber attacks,² it is not surprising that undermining censorship should be seen as simply another part of foreign policy. Former US Secretary of State Clinton in 2011 pledged “to 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” and committed $25million “to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression.”³

It is therefore clear that states will use circumventing the censorship of other countries as part of their foreign policy but is it legitimate to do so? Legitimacy is unfortunately quite a nebulous concept in politics and international relations; what one state, or person, considers legitimate is beyond the pale for another. There is not even consensus on whether it is inputs or outputs that matter; is it the decision making process and the institutions through which that process travels or is it the results that are politically legitimate? Today we might consider only democratically representative government to be legitimate, but even if the government is considered legitimate is its foreign policy automatically then legitimate?⁴ We might consider the Iraq war for example; there is no doubt that the Bush Administration and Tony Blair’s government were legitimate but it is much more questionable whether the policy they were undertaking was.

Circumventing internet censorship may be a foreign policy that is much less controversial than engaging in a war but the legitimacy of the policy is still contestable. Much of this debate is therefore about whether legitimacy in foreign policy comes from the domestic or the international sphere.

1 Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2012, http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2012

2 Reed, john, “Cyber Command fielding 13 “offensiveForeign Policy Killer Apps, 12 March 2013, http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/03/12/us_cyber_command_developing_13_offensive_cyber_deterrence_units

” cyber deterrence units”,

3 Clinton, H., ‘Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Speech on Internet Freedom *updated*’, Secretaryclinton, 15 February 2011, http://secretaryclinton.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/secretary-of-state-hillary-clintons-speech-on-internet-freedom/

4 Peter, Fabienne, "Political Legitimacy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/legitimacy/