Creating an Internet agency 'would be a legitimate thing to do,' Bill Clinton said. Clinton: Create Internet agency

Bill Clinton doesn’t like all the misinformation and rumors floating on the Internet. And he thinks the United Nations or the U.S. government should create an agency to do something about it.

“It would be a legitimate thing to do,” Clinton said in an interview airing Friday on CNBC.


The agency, Clinton said, would “have to be totally transparent about where the money came from” and would have to be “independent” because “if it’s a government agency in a traditional sense, it would have no credibility whatever, particularly with a lot of the people who are most active on the internet.”

“Let’s say the U.S. did it, it would have to be an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else because people wouldn’t think you were just censoring the news and giving a different falsehood out,” Clinton said.

“That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors” he said. “And also, they would also have to have citations so that they could be checked in case they made a mistake. Somebody needs to be doing it, and maybe it’s a worthy expenditure of taxpayer money.”

Interviewed alongside the CEO of a cybersecurity company, Clinton also said he did not expect lasting impact from the documents disclosed by WikiLeaks showing employees of the State Department — run by his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — assessing world leaders.

“I don’t believe there’s any long-lasting impact on our relationships. People know that we didn’t leak this on purpose. People know that the secretary of state and her top team, they had nothing to do with this,” Clinton said. The diplomats whose cables were made public “were just giving their impressions” of what they saw on the ground in countries around the world.

At the same time, though, political figures in other countries “will be careful what they say to America’s representatives around the world for a while because they’ll have bad memories of the, you know, the leaked memo,” he said.

Stressing the dangers of putting some information online, Clinton said that he and his wife keep hard copies of their living wills that can’t be tampered with.

“It’s not like it’s that big or important, but it’s important to me, whatever I have to give to my family and whatever else I want to support,” he said. “I’d be appalled to think somebody could fool with it.”

He added: “I do have a physical copy in one place, and I think that’s important. So I think, you know, one of the things we may have to think about is whether our backstops and a lot of things are old-fashioned. Maybe snail mail, maybe more couriers.”

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Bill Clinton