Jody Westby Explains How ICANN Affects Free Speech

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FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. I’m very pleased to welcome for the first time a guest I’ve just met who has been active for quite some time in a variety of different capacities in trying to protect this country against cyber warfare and otherwise to prepare it to deal with the challenges in an increasingly dynamic cyber environment. Her name is Jody Westby. She is a lawyer by training, but she’s had a very interesting career in a lot of different places, including serving as the senior managing director for Price-Waterhouse-Cooper, adjunct professor at Georgia Tech, blogging for Forbes.com. She helped launch at the Central Intelligence Agency In-Q-Tel, an interesting venture aimed at trying to address some of the agency’s most pressing technology problems. These days, she is the CEO of an entity she founded entitled Global Cyber Risk. As I said, I’ve just met her and had a chance to talk with her a little bit yesterday about concerns she has, concerns I very much share about the wisdom of the Obama administration’s determination to transfer an important instrument of control of the internet to so-called international stakeholders who look a lot like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the like to me. Jody Westby, thank you very much for finding some time to talk with us about all this. Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio.

JODY WESTBY:

Thank you, Frank. It’s my pleasure to join you this morning.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me ask you a little bit about what is at stake here, the arrangements that are essentially being transferred to this international entity, ICANN.

JODY WESTBY:

Well, ICANN is a non-profit organization that we helped found to manage the naming and numbering system associated with the internet. It’s a bit of an arcane function and organization, so I’ll try to speak simply about it because it can go down into the weeds fairly quickly. But ICANN basically oversees the assignment of domain names and they are responsible for an activity called IANA, the internet address and numbering system that is a function. And so basically what happens, very simply, is when you have a domain name like google.com, that domain name is assigned an IP address. And that IP address then is approved by national telecommunications, an industry, information administration. And – NTIA, it’s an entity within the Department of Commerce. NTIA approves that and then authorizes Verisign, who’s under contract to perform this function, to put it on the a-server. From the a-server, then, everyday it’s replicated out to the other root servers around the world. So nothing gets on the internet until NTIA approves it and the number has been assigned to that domain name to the route servers.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That’s the way it works today. The NTIA being a US government agency.

JODY WESTBY:

Correct.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So what would it be like under the new management arrangement that would go into effect if the administration has its way at the start of the fiscal year on October 1, a week from tomorrow?

JODY WESTBY:

Well, NTIA is handing over this function to ICANN. And currently ICANN performs this under a contract with the Department of Commerce. But that contract is due to expire at the end of September. And ICANN has agreed with NTIA to take over that function. And that means the United States government will no longer have any involvement in this function.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Now, what are the practical effects of that as you see it, as somebody who’s spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to deal with the possibilities of cyber warfare or other, you know, attacks on our interests?

JODY WESTBY:

Let’s just deal with the big, broad issue first. The big, broad issue is the United States government has been under pressure for over a decade to have more involvement from other stakeholders, including other governments, in managing the internet. People say the US shouldn’t control the internet. And there was a government advisory committee set up about a decade ago to provide – it’s like a hundred and thirty-two governments, I believe, that provide input to ICANN. They’re not required to listen to it, they’re not required to act on it. But basically the US government has not done a good job in actually setting up a model where other governments really felt like they were being listened to and there was an effective multi-stakeholder participation. That’s part of the core of the problem. So this will hand this over to ICANN, which is a non-profit organization. And obviously, there are a lot of other governments and interested parties then who could influence this process. So that’s the broad thing. It will be more governance sharing. But we don’t know how that will unfold. And the government will have no control over that non-profit. So from our point of view, though, you look at it and you say, well, from the great role the United States plays as being this superpower, as being the inventor of the internet, that – the great role that we’ve played in providing this medium to the global community and making sure that all the users had access and it was managed properly and appropriately over this time, then that will go away.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

In other words, you’ve described a problem that has essentially arisen as a result of foreign governments complaining that they didn’t have a bigger role. But what we’ve essentially done in the benign stewardship of this entity we created, the internet, has been to maximize freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of innovation. And under the new approach, it may well be that those are a lot less free in the future, is it?

JODY WESTBY:

Yeah, we certainly provided the global medium for freedom of expression. Now we have to remember that within each country they have their own laws about speech and content and there have always been numerous laws around the globe about speech and content. And there are sovereign state rights and limits within international law in interfering in sovereign state rights. All that said, certainly the internet provided a medium for freedom of expression and we saw that in Arab Spring. And it’s one that often can circumvent some government control. But, you know, basically, all of that is a very big, beneficial picture. But if we just – and that’s why, and people really don’t care about that so much. They say, oh, that’s good, that’s great. But they’re not understanding the real reason why, from the United States of America, NTIA handing over this function to a non-profit organization and ceding all US government control is so dangerous. And that is because, when you think about it, if we are in cyber warfare capability, our ability to insure the integrity of the numbers being assigned to those route servers, which basically control all the traffic on the internet, that is critically important. Both if you are looking at it from a defensive perspective or an offensive perspective. And I’m not insinuating the United States would do anything in an offensive perspective that would be harmful to other nation-states. But it may be useful to protect our own national security interests.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

I just want to say, I’m deeply appreciative of not only your insights, but the work that Senator Ted Cruz and others on Capitol Hill have been mounting of late and of Donald Trump’s weighing in on this thing very recently, I hope it will be sufficient with the help of our listeners and many, many other Americans in this now very critical window to stave off a self-inflicted wound, a diminishing of our country, a fundamental transformation, if you will, of the United States. Jody, we have to leave it at that for the moment. I hope you’ll come back to us with updates as this goes forward and keep up the good work at your enterprise of Global Cyber Risk. And thank you for your time today. Next up, we’ll talk with Ambassador Yoram Ettinger about the Obama agenda for Israel and more, straight ahead.