Chris Dodd for President

Following Senator Dodd's time at Google yesterday, he was interviewed by YouTube's Steve Grove.

I particularly like the "Constitutional or not?" flash round of questions.

I wanted to highlight a couple responses to Senator Dodd's visit to Google HQ yesterday in Mountain View, California. In his speech, Dodd called on Google to pledge to stand up to the Bush Administration when it comes to protecting the privacy of their customer data, as well as take active steps to expand free access to information abroad, including closing Google.cn, a search engine that censors many results on subjects deemed controversial by the Chinese government. In many regards, Dodd's speech was not what people expected. It wasn't a laundry list of technology policies, as other candidates have given. Rather it was a moment where Dodd spoke truth to one of the most influential technology companies in the world and called on them to actively do good with their power.

Sarah Lai Stirland of Wired has a similar take:

[T]his speech is one of the very few presidential campaign trail talks that acknowledges the pivotal role that massive data storage is now playing in our society, and the risk it poses to our privacy.

Dodd's talk alluded to the crucial, and wider point that it's the private sector that controls much of citizens' data in the modern world -- not the government.

So it seemed entirely appropos -- yet entirely unusual -- that the presidential candidate would challenge and call on Google to provide policy solutions and ideas on how to protect user privacy in the modern world.

Aiming high is nothing new for Chris Dodd and this speech was yet another example of how Dodd has used his platform as a presidential candidate to offer bold leadership.

One of the reasons for giving the speech Senator Dodd gave yesterday is that Google does have a good, if not perfect, record of standing up for privacy issues, as well as a very impressive record of philanthropy and progressive development in energy policy. That is, though this speech wasn't geared towards telling Google what they want to hear, there was and remains a real expectation that Dodd's earnest call for leadership would be well received by Google.

Reading the Google Public Policy Blog today, it seems like Dodd's speech was very well received by its audience, which appreciated the challenge put forth to them.

Dodd’s speech centered on his outspoken opposition to retroactive immunity for telephone companies who allegedly assisted President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. He has taken to the Web to make his case against letting the companies off the hook, including through this YouTube video with whistleblower Mark Klein, the retired AT&T technician who uncovered “a switch [at AT&T’s facilities] that channeled Internet traffic culled from millions of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and offices across the nation to a secret room operated by the NSA.” Many lawsuits have been brought against AT&T and other carriers to stop this alleged cooperation with government surveillance of Americans, but immunity could stop these cases in their tracks.

While pledging to uphold Americans' constitutional liberties if elected president, Dodd also impressed upon Googlers that it is our responsibility to protect these sacred liberties as well. As he put it, Google's commitment to the free flow of information and powerful, speech-enabling technology provides the foundation for "a transformative power both vast and unprecedented - the capability to not only transform society but the very notion of society. Of community. Of democracy." At the same time, he challenged Google to do more to defend free expression and privacy both in the U.S. and abroad, directly questioning our decision to operate in Internet-restricting countries like China.

I look forward to seeing more reaction from the tech world, the human rights world, and from Google itself. Hopefully they will continue to respond well to the challenges Dodd put to them yesterday on the free access to information and the protection of private information from all prying eyes, be they the US government or any other government.

Leadership means saying what you believe to be true, even when people may not be ready to hear it. I'm proud of Senator Dodd's decision to go to Google and ask more of them, just as I'm optimistic that the audience there is ready to join Dodd in his continued fight to protect our civil liberties at home while restoring our reputation abroad.

You can read the text of Senator Dodd's speech here.

In Senator Dodd's speech at Google, he called for the company to push the Chinese government to lift censorship requirements on Google.cn and if that was not acceptable with the Chinese, for Google to shutter Google.cn. Dodd said:

I challenge you today to pledge that you will stand up for best practices – as a company, but also as individuals.

Practices that increase transparency and support technologies that expand free expression, reject business with repressive states, and protect users in those countries.

That is how the Internet can be part of something greater than ourselves and spread democratic principles around the world.

And you can start with this:

By telling the Chinese government that Google.cn will no longer censor information with Google’s consent.

And should the Chinese government not find that acceptable, Google.cn will be shut down.

I know you have already moved all of your search records out of China to prevent them from being turned over to the Chinese government.

But what better way to affirm Google’s commitment to democracy and the free flow of information as a human right than to send this message to the country with the largest population in the world?

The first question Senator Dodd got was about the relative value and importance to censor certain information in certain situations. The Google interviewer cited censorship of Nazi sites in France and Germany as a comparison where censorship is approved. Another example would be how we censor - or attempt to censor - child pornography in the United States.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) has previously replied to this line of Google defense, quite convincingly:

It has also been argued Internet companies are entitled to apply the same rules of engagement in China that they apply elsewhere. In Germany, for example, where denying the Holocaust is against the law, access to Neo-Nazi Web pages is impossible via Google. The company notifies its users that not all Web pages may be available. And in its new China services, Google issues a similar warning.

But as the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.

The point Lantos is making is clear - censoring information about Nazism in countries like Germany is no parallel to censoring information about democracy, Tiananmen Square, Tibet, or the Falun Gong in China.

The larger point that Senator Dodd sought to make and I am bringing up here is that Google has the ability unlike any other to bring serious ethical leadership along with groundbreaking technology. The bar is high for a company like Google to leverage their technological prowess towards the growth of democracy and free access to information as a force for good. What is disappointing about the comparison between subjects like Nazism and democracy in Tiananmen Square is that it is a false one. Were Google to shut down Google.cn, they would not have to continue to make this argument.

Senator Dodd issued a challenge today, not because it was the easy thing to do, but because it's what we expect from our leaders, both in politics and in technology. I hope that Google is up for the challenge and look forward to the ensuing debate on the role of companies like Google using their tools to expand the free access to information, even in the most repressive of countries.

Thank you. My friends, not far from here stands a building located at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco.

I am sure that address is familiar to some of you. In fact, it is precisely 35.7 miles from the spot on which I am standing.

"Google Maps."

A few years ago, an Internet technician in that building named Mark Klein received an email that informed him someone from the National Security Agency would be visiting.

Indeed, it was Mark Klein who opened the door to let the gentleman in when that day came a short while later.

Not long after, he and a co-worker discovered something unprecedented - a switch that channeled Internet traffic culled from millions of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and offices across the nation to secret room operated by the NSA. There, that information was collected and processed ostensibly for the purposes of defending the nation.

Was the handover of this information necessary for national security? We have no idea - with very few exceptions, Congress is as much in the dark as the public.

And I believe one would be hard-pressed to understand why our government would need a copy of all Internet traffic to keep us safe.

That we know this happened is not because the government told us - they say the matter is classified.

Not because AT&T told us - they say they are forbidden by law from doing so.

Indeed, we may not have known any of this at all were it not for Mr. Klein, a 22-year veteran of AT&T who was old enough to remember when a law was passed to prevent this very sort of thing from happening in the first place. A law that was expressly written to give the government the tools it needed to defend the country.

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