Who cares about legality when it comes to 'freedom'?

United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, announced yesterday plans to provide $25 million of funding to those trying to circumvent restrictive internet policies and technologies. While this is all very well, what gives the US the right to interfere with the policies of sovereign states? Now, I am not being so naive to suggest this is a new approach to foreign affairs. Quite the contrary, I am only surprised that this plan has been declared so openly as this is, after all, the same government which is restricting the access of Federal employees to the Wikileaks site. One can only assume therefore, that the US government sees itself as a far better judge of what information people should access than the Chinese, Burmese, Cuban or Syrian governments identified in Mrs Clinton's speech.

It is no secret that US governments have long considered themselves the global defenders of 'freedom', with numerous Cold War incidents (for example, the Bay of Pigs invasion) and the extensive covert funding of dissidents in countries which found themselves on the wrong side of those in Washington. It is however, intriguing that this funding has been publicised, as it appears to be against the spirit, if not the letter, of international law. The United Nations Charter upholds the sovereignty of all states, which includes the right to a state's authority over its domestic affairs. By openly supporting dissidents and technologies intended to circumvent internet restrictions, the US government is meddling in the domestic affairs of a state and potentially opening a proverbial can of worms.

What gives the US the right to determine what websites the Chinese government, deems 'acceptable'? If the Obama administration is suggesting that the internet is a global resource, then surely any attempts to police it, by the removal of alleged 'terrorist' or 'indecent' material, is a restriction of freedom, as it is a basic right of any human to communicate. Now, while I do not condone the material mentioned above, there needs to be some equality when it comes to the supposed 'freedom' of the internet. If the US believes bomb-making material to be a security threat, why can't the Chinese government argue the same about Twitter? As a social networking tool, Twitter is a potential security threat to autocratic governments and as much as the US may want to see these regimes fall, its higher-than-thou neo-liberal approach is extremely shallow and likely to do more harm than good.