US cyber coordinator: Russia's Internet plans are a problem

Christopher Painter is the US State Department's first coordinator for cyber issues. Prior to that, he served in the White House as senior director for cybersecurity policy in the National Security Staff.

DW: When German and US politicians are asked what is being done to try to repair the lost trust due to fallout from the NSA surveillance scandal, they refer to the White House-Chancellery dialogue and to the German-American cyber-dialogue that were launched. But many Germans probably have never heard of either and if they have they are skeptical whether it will produce anything that could help restore that lost trust. Do you have anything else in the pipeline to try to achieve that?

Christopher Painter: Let me start by saying why having trust and having a good and strong relationship with Germany is so important in this area. There are a number of threats we are facing, both technical threats in terms of intrusions and denial of service attacks that are coming from criminals or nation states or others. We also have a number of policy challenges where we have more repressive regimes that have a vastly different view of what this technology is and what the future of the Internet should be than we collectively do. A lot of these issues are debated in a lot of different forums around the world and it's critically important that Germany and the US be partners in advancing the vision of an open, interoperable and secure and reliable Internet.

I would not want to minimize the two things you mentioned. Structured dialogue is really important. The cyber-dialogue is really more about collaborating on the area where we can build a positive agenda. For that we concentrated on how we collaborate on all these international fora, on big data, innovation and privacy. We did that between our two governments, but also with other stakeholders like civil society, the private sector and others. Unlike any other dialogue I have been to, we had an incredibly high-level group coming over from the US including John Podesta, the president's adviser - as far as I know this is the only country he came to after his big report.

But people shouldn't look at this and just think we are just discussing things and nothing is happening. A lot of this is how we built trust. Those dialogues are not the only time we talk to Germany. It is clear that this is a priority for us and the relationship is a priority for us. There are also a lot of the activities happening in the US where the president is addressing how information is collected and how we can extend some of the protections that US citizens have to citizens of other countries. People have to look at the activities that are happening in the US, which they may not be aware of, and look at the various ways we are talking to each other to really solidify the relationship.

Russia recently announced new rules to restrict so-called extremist content online and requiring social networks to store their data in Russia and there are also plans for a kill switch to ensure that Russian news and information systems remain online during emergencies. What's your take on that?

This is one of the struggles we are seeing that I mentioned. There are countries who view the Internet as a threat and not as an opportunity, who don't want to see an open Internet and want to have more governmental control. We use terms like cyber-security and that means security of networks. They use terms like information security because they are worried about the destabilizing - in their view - nature of information. When you see measures like that, where you are trying to keep data in your country so you can keep better control it, that is a problem.

When you see initiatives that say we are going to cut ourselves off from the rest of the Internet - that is first not so easy to do and second terrible for people's ability to communicate. This is a real problem because Russia and others have come up with the idea that you have sovereignty over your information space, that you can draw a border around it. We think universal human rights are universal human rights, including the right to express yourself and that doesn't stop at the border. If you try to cut yourself off or try to fragment the Internet that has huge economic consequences as well. We certainly have to fight that, but we also have to work with the developing world which are on the fence on a lot of these issues and explain to them that an open Internet is good for their economy and their people.

Russia is of course not the only that is acting in that fashion, China, Iran and others are as well. Turkey, a close US ally, has also taken steps to curb Internet freedom. Is that a concern for you and have you talked to your Turkish colleagues about that?

We have and have made it clear to them in the past that we felt that this was not the right way. Free expression is something that should be allowed in every democratic society. We did raise our concerns and were very heartened when the Supreme Court in Turkey reversed some of those rulings and made it clear that free expression is important in Turkey.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, considered to be one of the founders of the Internet, has been pushing for a bill of rights for the Internet, essentially enshrining citizens' rights when it comes to companies and governments in a legal document. What is your stance on that?

We would have to figure out more what it really is. It is still a bit amorphous. I worry sometimes about efforts, and this is not one of those, advanced by Russia and China for what they call code of conduct in the UN as a discussion paper. That does really touch upon some of these sovereignty issues and governmental control of the Internet. People often ask do you need a binding treaty for the Internet. First, I would say who would sign a binding treaty for the Internet, and then I would ask what that really is and whether it restricts the kind of innovation, growth and freedom we have on the Internet.

I think it's good to have some founding principles and one of the core ones we have promoted from the beginning is the idea of having an open and unified and secure Internet. There are lots of things I could think about that are values and there are a lot of things out there like the Freedom Online Declaration of Tallinn recently. But I want to be careful that we are not too descriptive and too legalistic about this rather than promoting the core values we want.