Information Curtain

Hillary Clinton’s Churchillian description of Internet censorship.

Hillary Clinton provoked the ire of China’s Foreign Ministry with a speech she made on Internet censorship, The Times’s Edward Wong reported:

Mrs. Clinton’s sweeping speech with its cold war undertones – likening the information curtain to the Iron Curtain – criticized several countries by name, including China, for Internet censorship. It was the first speech in which a top administration official offered a vision for making Internet freedom an integral part of foreign policy.

Wong noted that discussions of Internet censorship were reinvigorated recently by Google’s threat to pull out of China:

Until now, the Chinese government had been trying to frame the dispute with Google as a commercial matter, perhaps because officials want to avoid having the dispute become a referendum on Internet censorship policies among Chinese liberals and foreign companies operating in China. On Thursday, He Yafei, a vice foreign minister, had said the Google dispute should not be “over-interpreted” or linked to the bilateral relationship with the United States, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency.

But in the aftermath of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, that attitude could be changing. Mrs. Clinton pointedly said that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world” and identified China as one of a handful of countries that had stepped up Internet censorship in the past year. (Starting in late 2008, the Chinese government shut down thousands of Web sites under the pretext of an antipornography campaign.) She also praised American companies such as Google that are “making the issue of Internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions.”

(Winston Churchill made famous the oxymoronic “Iron Curtain” in a speechto Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. However, he did not coin the phrase – which the Oxford English Dictionary traces, in a political context, to at least 1920.)