'It’s a typical example of it’s right for thee but not for me,' said Alan Dershowitz. U.S weaves tangled Web policy

The Obama administration is stepping up its drive to promote Internet freedom, hoping that countries like Iran could be swept up by the same kind of Web-driven public demonstrations and political tumult that brought the regime in Egypt to its knees in a matter of weeks.

Advertisement However, critics say that as the United States calls for unfettered and uncensored access to the Internet around the globe, the Obama administration is stepping on its own message by aggressively pursuing a criminal investigation into the activities of online publisher WikiLeaks and how it obtained hundreds of thousands of classified American government reports. In an awkward bit of timing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to deliver a major speech on Internet freedom in Washington on Tuesday just hours after Justice Department lawyers are scheduled to be in federal court a few miles away in the first public courtroom showdown over the probe into WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Prosecutors are expected to urge a federal magistrate in Alexandria, Va., to uphold a court order requiring Twitter to turn over confidential information about the use of its services by three WikiLeaks supporters. “This is an outrageous attack by the Obama administration on the privacy and free speech rights of Twitter’s customers - many of them American citizens,” Assange complained in a statement Monday. “More shocking, at this time, is that it amounts to an attack on the right to freedom of association, a freedom that the people of Tunisia and Egypt, for example, spurred on by the information released by Wikileaks, have found so valuable." “It’s a typical example of it’s right for thee but not for me,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who recently signed on to advise Assange’s legal team. “They’re perfectly happy to see all of Iran’s secrets disclosed, but they draw the line at their own. They’re perfectly happy to see open media in every other part of the world, but here they’re trying to close down media that has challenged them. It’s a clear double standard at work, and we’re going to expose that double standard.” Obama administration officials insist there’s no conflict between promoting Web freedom abroad and enforcing U.S. laws regarding handling of confidential government data, like diplomatic cables and military reports. “WikiLeaks is not about Internet freedom,” a senior State Department official told POLITICO Monday. “It’s not even an Internet issue. It’s about U.S. government property being stolen which is under investigation by the Justice Department. … The fact that the Internet was used to conduct the crime does not make it about Internet freedom.” “WikiLeaks is about the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. It is not an exercise in Internet freedom,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said last month in a speech to students at the Washington Center . “It is about the legitimate investigation of a crime. It is about the need to continue to protect sensitive information while enabling the free flow of public information.” Crowley, who has publicly blasted Assange as an “anarchist,” said those claiming hypocrisy are misunderstanding the kind of openness the United States is advocating. “Transparency does not mean there are no secrets. Whether you are a government or a business, there is proprietary information that is vital to your day-to-day function. Coca-Cola has its secret formula. Google has its search algorithm. Their success is based on these secrets. As a government, we are no different,” Crowley said. Washington Middle East and democracy experts have generally welcomed the U.S. call for uninterrupted access to Facebook, Twitter and the Internet. But they’ve also noted that talking about Web freedom is a lot simpler than untangling conflicted U.S. interests toward the current instability in the Middle East, that threatens both adversaries such as Iran, as well as strong allies as Yemen’s President Saleh, who has backed the fight against Al Qaeda.

“It’s a little bit easier to make democracy-promotion about letting everyone have access to Facebook than it is to confront directly the core elements of an allied police state,” Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski said. “It’s a good thing to be promoting access to Facebook – but it’s also a little easier to do than the other thing.”

“I don’t care how much they tweet at the White House,” Iran analyst Trita Parsi told POLITICO. “Everything is unraveling, and the [Obama administration] is torn and not decisive, but is not ideological.”

“It’s a really complicated picture,” Parsi continued. “I think the U.S. can turn [what happened in Egypt] into a victory, but only … if it’s combined with the U.S. changing its policies significantly” toward the region, including changing its policies of supporting Arab dictatorships in the region.

Even some in the tech world see problems with the U.S. calling on countries to offer uncensored Web access while selling tear gas and weapons to the same countries’ militaries.

Clinton, “hopefully, will spell out some very concrete actions that the U.S. government can take that would do something to help these folks – dissidents and opposition parties in some of those countries,” a technology policy expert said on condition of anonymity Monday. “The problem you get into then is the whole hypocrisy problem. On the one hand, the U.S. saying, ‘Oh this is so great,’ and on the other hand, it’s training the [repressive regime’s] military.”

Experts on the Internet and the law say there’s no inherent contradiction in promoting robust Web freedom while pursuing breaches of government secrecy. However, they say, that pursuit should follow the same ground rules that have applied in such cases in the past: namely, focusing on the leaker and not the recipient or publisher of the leak.

“There’s some tension, although one can genuinely favor Internet freedom while rueing some particular instances of it, whether leaked private photos, credit card numbers, or classified material,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and a cofounder of the Berkman Center on the Internet. “The bottom line is that the prospect of classified material leaking should inspire a government to improve its security — and classification — practices rather than pulling back on the notion of an open network that connects citizens without undue opportunity for governments to block or surveil what they’re doing.”

Leakers have on occasion been prosecuted and punished. Indeed, an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking to WikiLeaks, Pvt. Bradley Manning, has been in custody for nearly a year awaiting a possible court-martial. However, no media organization has ever been charged in the United States with publishing classified information. Nevertheless, Obama administration officials and several lawmakers have seemed to raise just that prospect in the case of WikiLeaks and Assange in recent months by contending that the work they do is not journalism.

“My personal opinion is that WikiLeaks is not media,” Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson said in December. “I think WikiLeaks is on a different level from conventional journalism.”

“This is not journalism. This is a threat to our security,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

Dershowitz, Assange’s new lawyer, rejected those arguments Monday and warned that they pose a danger to all who rely on the Web to receive and exchange information.

“Assange is a journalist. He’s a new kind of journalist. He represents the newest wave of journalism,” the longtime civil libertarian told POLITICO. “To deny him status as a journalist is to deny reality and close the door to the future. … l don’t see any distinction between old media and new media. I’m currently in this case because I believe that to protect the First Amendment we need to protect new, electronic media vigorously.”