I consider that speech one of the most important, if not the most important speech she has ever made. Many ignored the speech, not the least of whom among them were the Arab leaders. Within weeks, we saw first Tunisia and then Egypt (among other North African and Arab states) erupt in what some have referred to as Twitter and/or Facebook Revolutions.
Some months ago here in New York, I had the privilege of meeting a young girl from Yemen. Her name is Nujood Ali. When she was nine years old, her family offered her into marriage with a much older man who turned out to be violent and abusive. At ten years old, desperate to escape her circumstances, she left her home and made her way to the local courthouse where she sat against a wall all day long until she was finally noticed, thankfully, by a woman lawyer named Shada Nasser, who asked this little girl what she was doing there. And the little girl said she came to get a divorce. And thanks to this lawyer, she did.Incarnations of these words of encouragement echo through her remarks when she speaks all over the world. Despite the attempted interference, Chinese students did manage to access the Internet Freedom speech of 01/21/10. When I followed the path they took to my blog, I ended up at an American site that allows you to bypass the firewall at your school. It appears pretty clear now that the youth of Tunisia and Egypt found access to her words in Doha. I am not saying she set this off, but it appears to me that they knew their idea had some kind of support in the administration.
Now in another time, the story of her individual courage and her equally brave lawyer would not have been covered in the news even in her own country. But now, it is beamed worldwide by satellites, shared on blogs, posted on Twitter, celebrated in gatherings. Today, women are finding their voices, and those voices are being heard far beyond their own narrow circumstances. And here’s what each of you can do. You can visit the website of a nonprofit called Kiva, K-i-v-a, and send a microloan to an entrepreneur like Blanca, who wants to expand her small grocery store in Peru. You can send children’s books to a library in Namibia by purchasing items off an Amazon.com wish list. You can sit in your dorm room, or soon your new apartment, and use the web to plant trees across Africa through Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt movement.
And with these social networking tools that you use every day to tell people you’ve gone to get a latte or you’re going to be running late, you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking or child marriage, like the two recent college graduates in Colombia – the country – who organized 14 million people into the largest anti-terrorism demonstration in history, doing as much damage to the FARC terrorist network in a few weeks than had been done in years of military action. (Applause.)
And you can organize through Twitter, like the undergraduates at Northwestern who launched a global fast to bring attention to Iran’s imprisonment of an American journalist. And we have two young women journalists right now in prison in North Korea, and you can get busy on the internet and let the North Koreans know that we find that absolutely unacceptable. (Applause.)
These new tools are available for everyone. They are democratizing diplomacy. So over the next year, we will be creating Virtual Student Foreign Service Internships to partner American students with our embassies abroad to conduct digital diplomacy. And you can learn more about this initiative on the State Department website.
This is an opportunity for all of us to ask ourselves: What can I do? I’m heading off to my first job or I may be going to travel for a while or I have some other ideas that I’m exploring. But no matter what you’re doing, you can be a citizen activist and a citizen diplomat. You’ve already begun to make the connections and partnerships that will give you support throughout your lives. And therefore, I invite you to forge those connections beyond this class.
You’ve learned here at Barnard that in spite of our differences, we are all connected. And we need to be looking for ways to find inspiration from our daily lives. Just a few weeks ago, I read President Spar’s column in the Wall Street Journal, in which she bravely attempted to write her own application essay for Barnard. She described a typical day in her life, one that involved coordinating her kids’ carpooling, fixing dinner, answering emails, dealing with a mischievous cat, writing a speech on – what else – women and leadership. As I read about the controlled chaos of your president’s life, I thought this sure sounds familiar. And as I look out in the audience today, I see a lot of mothers and grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers and family members and friends, and I know that you too have had these experiences.
But no matter how we come to this commencement, we leave knowing that another class of extraordinary young women, who will have the manner and the education to go and not only pursue their own dreams but help bring along others as well, has occurred within this remarkable institution. We all have an opportunity today to do so much more than I even dreamed possible when I sat where you are sitting all those years ago.
I think we are all impressed that a huge and peaceful coup was carried out in 18 days and was organized using the social networks our SOS values so highly. We all congratulate the Egyptian people this evening. I, for one, am looking forward to Mme. Secretary's Tuesday speech. She is most assuredly on the side of the democratic use of and openness for the social media.
A cautionary tale, however, lurks in an article from HuffPo dated, June 25, 2010. Perhaps you missed it. I did.
Internet 'Kill Switch' Approved By Senate Homeland Security CommitteeGiven what we have seen over the past 18 days in Egypt, the precious ability to access the internet in a time of national crisis is clear. To obstruct such access in a national emergency seems a dangerous extension of power indeed. Our government, particularly our SOS pleaded with Egyptian authorities to restore access. Our own government, however, could potentially deny us that access. Hypocritical and downright unconstitutional, I think, in the freest country in the world, the one that stands as an icon, a beacon of hope, to people fighting for freedom all over the globe.
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has approved a cybersecurity bill, Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), that would give the president far-reaching authority over the Internet in the case of emergency.
As The Hill explains, the bill, sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, and Tom Carper, would give the president "emergency authority to shut down private sector or government networks in the event of a cyber attack capable of causing massive damage or loss of life." The original bill granted the president the authority to "indefinitely" shut down networks, but an amendment to the PCNAA, approved yesterday, mandates that the president "get Congressional approval after controlling a network for 120 days."
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