Jared Cohen Quotes

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.

The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.

The Internet has exceeded our collective expectations as a revolutionary spring of information, news, and ideas. It is essential that we keep that spring flowing. We must not thwart the Internet's availability by taxing access to it.

The advantage of the internet is that it has taken away the charade of politics. China has heard of democracy and people know about certain concepts they wouldn't have previously.

The Chinese government sometimes shuts down the Internet and mobile services in specific areas where unrest occurs.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.

Ordinary Chinese are also getting unprecedented access to information. More than half a billion Chinese now use the Internet.

In addition to all the good things it's done, the Internet has empowered an awful lot of people who would have been best off disempowered, including quite a few bloggers on both sides.

The argument about the need to regulate the digital space has to be weighed against freedom of expression in our society, whether we are interacting in a virtual world or in the real world where we have the growth of so-called 'safe spaces.'

Information technology is a formidable enabler of freedoms. For example, it lowers barriers to freedom of expression and allows people to get a better grasp of their lives. It should not be used to reduce the freedom of people.

The IT people who have made such an effort to know and understand computer technology. They are frustrated that you cannot use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China. They are the first to recognize that the situation is terrible.

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.

There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.

There are many cases of activists having their Facebook pages and accounts deactivated at critical times, when they are right in the middle of a campaign or organising a demonstration.

We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

There's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.

Despite its enormous power and wealth, China's ruling elite remains absolutely petrified that the free flow of information will undermine its political legitimacy, particularly among China's younger generation.

While the Internet can't be controlled 100 percent, it's possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.

We in the ministry of IT and Communications often get flak for deciding what to ban. We actually never decide something should be banned. We always follow orders from different ministries.

Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: what we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it.

One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.