Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  I met with Préval at his temporary residence. We sat close together in plush chairs, practically knee-to-knee. I started talking about what it means to think not just for tomorrow but for the long term. I told him that this was his defining moment. He was either going to be remembered as a President no different from all the Haitian leaders in history who refused to listen to their people, or he was going to be remembered as the President who allowed democracy to take root. He had to choose. “I’m talking to you not only as your friend, but as someone who loves my country and had to do a lot of hard things, too,” I said. “Do the hard thing, because the hard thing is going to ultimately be in the best interests of your country and in your best interests, even though you won’t feel that way until you’re able to step back and look back.” He ended the meeting saying, “Well, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Shortly afterward Préval and all three candidates accepted the OAS results. The celebrated musician Michel Martelly, widely known as “Sweet Micky,” won the run-off, and Préval retired. Usually the winner of an election receives all the kudos. But in this case I thought the hero of the hour was the man who stepped down gracefully, even with his country still reeling from an unimaginable catastrophe. It was the first time in Haitian history that any President peacefully turned over power to someone from an opposing party.

  This was a very good sign for the country’s future. The link between sustainable development and good governance is well established. That’s why we put it at the heart of many of our aid programs, most notably the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Haiti’s troubles on both fronts provided a case in point. And we had a counterexample readily available. Chile was hit by an even more powerful earthquake just a month after Haiti. But unlike Haiti, Chile had the infrastructure, resources, and governing institutions to withstand such a devastating event and respond quickly and effectively. To “build back better” Haiti needed to do more than clean up the rubble and get the economy going again. It needed a strong democracy and an accountable, responsive government. A peaceful transfer of power was a crucial first step.

  I was pleased to see Préval at the Caracol ribbon-cutting event, but I wondered how he and Martelly would interact. To my surprise and delight, Martelly acknowledged Préval and brought him up onstage. Then they raised their hands together in celebration. It was a simple gesture, familiar to Americans. But no two Presidents had ever done that in Haiti—mainly because there have been so few peaceful transitions. It left me believing that Haiti was, finally, despite all of the struggles, on a better path.

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  In the international development business, it’s easy to get frustrated and fatalistic. But step back and look at the sweep of history, and you realize just how remarkable our country’s contributions have been. Just in my lifetime the United States has helped eradicate smallpox and reduce polio and malaria. We helped save millions of lives through immunizations, life-saving treatment for AIDS, and oral rehydration therapy that greatly reduced the deaths of infants and children. We helped educate millions of young people and provided significant support to once impoverished countries that have flourished and become generous donors themselves, such as South Korea. Americans should take pride in these achievements, which have not only helped humanity but have also helped our nation project our values and strengthen our leadership in the world.

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  21st-Century Statecraft: Digital Diplomacy in a Networked World

  My government can go to hell!” declared the young woman defiantly. I had asked a pro-democracy activist from Belarus if she was worried about facing repercussions when she returned home from TechCamp, a training session the State Department organized in neighboring Lithuania in June 2011. We used these sessions to help civil society groups from across the region learn how to use technology to advance their work and avoid persecution. Among the countries to emerge from the old Soviet Union, Belarus had one of the most repressive regimes. But this woman wasn’t afraid, she told me. She had come to Lithuania to learn new skills that would help her stay one step ahead of the censors and secret police. I liked her style.

  There were about eighty other activists from eighteen countries crammed into a small room in Vilnius for two eleven-hour days of training. For the most part, they weren’t wide-eyed idealists or technology evangelists. These were dissidents and organizers who were eager for any new tools that would help them express their views, organize, and circumvent censorship. A team of experts from the State Department was on hand to explain how activists could protect their privacy and anonymity online and thwart restrictive government firewalls. We also had executives from Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Skype.

  Some of the activists talked about how the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad monitored the hashtags used by opposition Twitter users and then flooded the network with spam using the same tags to thwart those trying to follow the opposition. Was there anything they could do to prevent that? Others wanted help mapping demonstrations and crackdowns in real time during crises.

  That evening I took members of my delegation out to dinner at a local restaurant in Vilnius. Over Lithuanian beer, I asked how they thought the day had gone. Alec Ross, my Senior Advisor for Innovation, was particularly pleased. In 2008, Alec had helped the Obama campaign’s outreach to Silicon Valley and the broader technology industry. When I became Secretary, I asked him to help me move the State Department into the 21st century. I myself am not the most tech-savvy person—although I surprised my daughter and my staff by falling in love with my iPad, which I now take everywhere I travel—but I understood that new technologies would reshape how we practiced diplomacy and development, just as they were changing how people everywhere communicated, worked, organized, and played.

  We discussed how these tools were in and of themselves value-neutral. They could be forces for bad as easily as for good, just as steel can be used to build hospitals or tanks and nuclear power can either energize a city or destroy it. We had to act responsibly to maximize technology’s benefits—while minimizing the risks.

  Technology was opening up new avenues to help solve problems and promote America’s interests and values. We would focus on helping civil society across the world harness mobile technology and social media to hold governments accountable, document abuses, and empower marginalized groups, including women and young people. I’d seen firsthand how innovations were lifting people out of poverty and giving them more control over their own lives. In Kenya farmers saw their income grow by as much as 30 percent after they started using cell phones for mobile banking technology and learning how better to protect crops from pests. In Bangladesh more than 300,000 people signed up to learn English on their mobile phones. There were nearly 4 billion cell phones in use in the developing world, many of them in the hands of farmers, market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who’d historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Various studies have found that a 10 percent increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones in a developing country can lead to an increase in GDP per capita of between 0.6 and 1.2 percent. That translates to billions of dollars and countless jobs.

  However, we’d also seen the darker side of the digital revolution. The same qualities that made the internet a force for unprecedented progress—in its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed—also enabled wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. It’s well known that the internet is a source for nearly as much misinformation as information, but that’s just the beginning. Terrorists and extremist groups use the internet to incite hate, recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, retailers, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts. Criminal gangs as well as nations are building offensive cyber warfare and industrial espionage capabilities. Critical infrastruct
ure like power grids and air traffic control systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attack.

  Like other sensitive government agencies, the State Department was frequently the target of cyber attacks. Department officials had to fend off intrusions in their email and increasingly sophisticated phishing attempts. When we first arrived at State, these attempts were similar to the fraudulent emails many Americans experience at home on their personal computers. Just as the broken English of the infamous Nigerian bank scam tips off most users, the often sloppy early attempts to penetrate our secure systems were easy to spot. But by 2012, the sophistication and fluency had advanced considerably, with attackers impersonating State Department officials in an attempt to dupe their colleagues into opening legitimate-looking attachments.

  When we traveled to sensitive places like Russia, we often received warnings from Department security officials to leave our BlackBerrys, laptops—anything that communicated with the outside world—on the plane, with their batteries removed to prevent foreign intelligence services from compromising them. Even in friendly settings we conducted business under strict security precautions, taking care where and how we read secret material and used our technology. One means of protecting material was to read it inside an opaque tent in a hotel room. In less well-equipped settings we were told to improvise by reading sensitive material with a blanket over our head. I felt like I was ten years old again, reading covertly by flashlight under the covers after bedtime. On more than one occasion I was cautioned not to speak freely in my own hotel room. And it wasn’t just U.S. government agencies and officials who were targets. American companies were also in the crosshairs. I fielded calls from frustrated CEOs complaining about aggressive theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, even breaches of their home computers. To better focus our efforts against this increasingly serious threat, I appointed the Department’s first Coordinator for Cyber Issues in February 2011.

  Around the world, some countries began erecting electronic barriers to prevent their people from using the internet freely and fully. Censors expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They cracked down on citizens who engaged in nonviolent political speech, and not just during periods of unrest and mass protest. One of the most prominent examples was China, which, as of 2013, was home to nearly 600 million internet users but also some of the most repressive limits on internet freedom. The “Great Firewall” blocked foreign websites and particular pages with content perceived as threatening to the Communist Party. Some reports estimate that China employed as many as 100,000 censors to patrol the web. For ten months starting in 2009 the government even shut down the internet altogether in the northwest province of Xinjiang after riots among the ethnic Uighur population.

  That June, young Iranians used websites and social media to get their message out during protests after disputed elections. The brutal shooting of a twenty-six-year-old woman named Neda Agha-Soltan by pro-government paramilitary forces was captured on grainy cell phone footage, uploaded to the web, and shared far and wide via Twitter and Facebook. Within hours millions of people watched Neda die in a pool of blood on a Tehran street. Time magazine described it as “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.” The video helped galvanize global outrage on behalf of the protesters.

  Just five days earlier, State Department officials who were tracking the online efforts of the Iranian opposition made a troubling discovery. Twitter was planning to shut down its global service for preplanned maintenance at a time that would be the middle of the day in Tehran. Jared Cohen, a twenty-seven-year-old member of our Policy Planning Staff, had contacts at Twitter. In April he had organized a trip to Baghdad for Jack Dorsey, one of the cofounders of the company, and other technology executives. He quickly reached out to alert Dorsey to the disruption the shutdown could cause to Iranian activists. As a result Twitter delayed its maintenance until the middle of the following night. In a blog post the company noted the reason for the delay was “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.”

  But the Iranian government also proved adept at using these new technological tools for its own purposes. Their Revolutionary Guard stalked protest leaders by tracking their online profiles. When some Iranians living overseas posted criticism of the regime, their family members in Iran were singled out for punishment. The authorities eventually shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. They also relied on more conventional means of intimidation and terror. In the face of the brutal crackdown, the protests crumbled.

  I was appalled by what happened in Iran and by the persecution of online activists in authoritarian states all over the world. I turned to Dan Baer, our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor whom I had recruited from Georgetown, where he was a professor researching and teaching about the intersection between ethics, economics, and human rights. I asked Dan to work with Alec and his team to find ways we could help. They told me there were powerful emerging technologies we could fund that would help dissidents circumvent government surveillance and censorship. Our investments could play a pivotal role in taking such tools to scale and making them accessible to the activists who needed them most. But there was a catch: Criminals and hackers could also use these tools to avoid detection. Our own intelligence and law enforcement agencies would have a hard time keeping up. Could we be opening up a Pandora’s box of illicit online activity? Was it worth the risk to empower and protect the activists?

  I took those concerns seriously. The implications for our national security were real. It was not an easy call. But I decided that striking a blow for free expression and association around the world was worth the risk. Criminals would always find ways of exploiting new technologies; that was no reason to sit on our hands. I gave the green light to move ahead. Our team got to work, and by the time I visited Lithuania in 2011, we had invested more than $45 million in tools to help keep dissidents safe online and trained more than five thousand activists worldwide, who turned around and trained thousands more. We worked with designers to create new apps and devices, such as a panic button that a protester could press on a phone that would signal to friends that he or she was being arrested, while simultaneously erasing all of their personal contacts.

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  This technology agenda was part of efforts to adapt the State Department and U.S. foreign policy to the 21st century. During the transition period before I became Secretary, I read an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs titled “America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Her concept of networks keyed off the architecture of the internet, but it was bigger than that. It had to do with all the ways people were organizing themselves in the 21st century, collaborating, communicating, trading, even fighting. In this networked world, she explained, diverse and cosmopolitan societies would have significant advantages over homogeneous and closed societies. They’d be better positioned to take advantage of expanding commercial, cultural, and technological networks and capitalize on the opportunities presented by global interdependence. This was good news, she argued, for the United States, with our multicultural, creative, hyperconnected population.

  In 2009, more than 55 million Americans were immigrants or the children of immigrants. These first- or second-generation Americans were valuable links back to their home countries and also significant contributors to our own country’s economic, cultural, and political life. Immigration helped keep the U.S. population young and dynamic at a time when many of our partners and competitors were aging. Russia, in particular, faced what President Putin himself has called a “demographic crisis.” Even China, because of its “One Child Policy,” was headed toward a demographic cliff. I only wish that the bipartisan bill passed in the Senate in 2013 reforming our immigration laws could pass the House.

  While I maintained a healthy r
espect for traditional forms of power, I agreed with Anne-Marie’s analysis of America’s comparative advantage in a networked world. Here was an answer to all the hand-wringing about decline that was rooted in both America’s oldest traditions and our newest innovations. I asked Anne-Marie to take a leave from Princeton and join me at the State Department as Director of Policy Planning, our internal think tank. She also helped lead a top-to-bottom review of the State Department and USAID that we called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. It was inspired by the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which I became familiar with as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and it aimed to map out exactly how we would put smart power into practice and use what I started calling “21st-Century Statecraft.” This included harnessing new technologies, public-private partnerships, diaspora networks, and other new tools, and it soon carried us into fields beyond traditional diplomacy, especially energy and economics.

  The State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs established a digital division to amplify our messaging across a wide range of platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Google+. By 2013 more than 2.6 million Twitter users followed 301 official feeds in eleven languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu. I encouraged our diplomats at embassies around the world to develop their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, to go on local TV, and to engage in every other way they could. Just as important, I wanted them to listen to what people in their countries were saying, including on social media. In an era in which security concerns often limited contact with foreign citizens, social media offered a way to hear from the people directly, even in relatively closed societies. More than 2 billion people were now online, nearly a third of humankind. The internet had become the public space of the 21st century, the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, and coffeehouse, so America’s diplomats needed to be there, too.