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The Treasury Department announced today that US companies can now export some Internet services to Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. That includes instant messaging, chat, e-mail and social networking programs. The World’s Jason Margolis reports.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  The Treasury Department announced today that it is now allowing the export of some internet software to Iran, Sudan and Cuba.  That’s a change.  Until today, trade sanctions banned U.S. companies from exporting communications services such as instant messaging, email and web browsing to those countries.  Now the doors have opened, just a little, for Yahoo, Microsoft and other American firms to do business there.  The World’s Jason Margolis tells us that the U.S. considers the move a way to help people exercise their most basic rights.

JASON MARGOLIS:  Corporate America didn’t force today’s announcement.  The new guidelines say the software that can now be exported must be free.  In other words, AOL and Microsoft don’t stand to make any money by offering these specific products in Iran, Cuba or Sudan.  The eased restrictions are part of a new push from the State Department for greater internet freedom.  Here’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking in January.

HILLARY CLINTON:  The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyber-space.  It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate.

MARGOLIS: Will today’s announcement advance the goal of greater freedom and transparency?  And will it advance U.S. national security interests?  It’s a move in the right direction says Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN:  I think it’s sort of a long-term indirect strategy.  I don’t really hear a lot of people in the U.S. government saying let’s get everyone in Iran on Twitter and the government will fall tomorrow.

MARGOLIS: There’s another issue this strategy doesn’t quite address.

AUSTIN HEAP:  The biggest problem with both Iran and Cuba is simply access.

MARGOLIS: Austin Heap runs the Censorship Research Center in San Francisco.

HEAP:  Without the access, it doesn’t matter that it’s legal for Microsoft to export its chat program.  So if you don’t have a method of getting to Microsoft’s website to download it because Iran blocks it, then this license does you no good.

MARGOLIS: Heap is also a computer programmer.  He’s part of a small Army of developers who are trying to develop ways for people in places like Iran to access the internet without being caught by the authorities.

HEAP:  We started just by offering proxy servers, which is basically you can think of it like a mirror.  Instead of you know, me connecting from my house directly to Twitter, I would connect from my house to say a machine in Australia, which would then connect to Twitter, and that worked for a little while.  But it became clear that as they stepped up their response, we had to come up with something equally powerful to fight back.

MARGOLIS: Heap came up with a program called Haystack.  He claims that it hides what web users are doing online.  His critics say the program is unproven.  Regardless, Heap wants the Treasury Department to allow him to export Haystack to places like Iran.  Ethan Zuckerman at Harvard says savvy internet users are already finding effective, though risky, ways to beat the censors.  He says today’s decision isn’t about that.

ZUCKERMAN: I think what the U.S. government is trying to do is say if you’re going to take this risk of getting around censorship to use a tool like Facebook, we want to make sure that there isn’t a Treasury Department rule that might make Facebook overact and block itself to Iranian users, for instance.  So it’s not so much that this is going to be the decision that brings about internet freedom, it’s more that this is a decision that keeps us from doing something really stupid in the wrong direction.

MARGOLIS: There are still lots of questions to be answered.  For example, why were only Iran, Cuba and Sudan exempted?  What about Syria, North Korea, or Burma?  The Treasury Department didn’t explain it’s reasoning in today’s statement.  The Treasury spokeswoman said nobody was available for comment today.  For The World, I’m Jason Margolis.

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