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new4now ago

Jared Cohen

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/file2/publication/article/SAAMAG/29494/pending/cohen_connections.jpg

A. Condoleezza Rice hired him at State Department B. with Rwanda president Paul Kagame C. retained at State Department by Hillary Clinton D. with Colombia president Álvaro Uribe E. with Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai F. judged films with Whoopi Goldberg G. briefing with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney H. with Prince Charles I. with King Abdullah II of Jordan J. with Iraq president Jalal Talabani K. interviewed Mullah Akbar Aghi in Afghan prison

Cohen's ties to Twitter

Jared Cohen, the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and Alec Ross,

Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft

And then Hillary Clinton arrived. “The secretary is the one who unleashed us,” Ross says. “She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft.”

Early this year, Ross and Cohen helped prop open the State Department’s doors by bringing 10 leading figures of the tech and social-media worlds to Washington for a private dinner with Clinton and her senior staff.

Among the guests were Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google;

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter;

James Eberhard of Mobile Accord; Shervin Pishevar of the mobile-phone-game-development company SGN;

Jason Liebman of Howcast;

Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards; and Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference on the intersection of politics and technology. Toward the end of the evening, Clinton delighted those assembled by inviting them to use her “as an app.”

A few days later, they did. On Jan. 12, the Haiti earthquake struck, and within two hours, Eberhard, working with the State Department, set up the Text Haiti 90999 program, which raised more than $40 million for the Red Cross in $10 donations.

It was also the day Google announced that Chinese hackers tried to break into the Gmail accounts of dissidents. In response, Google said that it would no longer comply with China’s censorship laws and for a few months redirected Chinese users to its Hong Kong search engine. The dispute rose to a high-level diplomatic conflict, but it also gave added resonance to the 45-minute “Internet freedom” speech Secretary Clinton delivered a little more than a week later, in which she placed “the freedom to connect” squarely within the U.S. human rights and foreign policy agenda.

At Google, and later at YouTube’s headquarters, Ross and Cohen stressed the political power of viral videos and the potential for mobile phones to become widespread public tools for education, banking and election monitoring

As the recent Wikileaks scandal suggests, new technologies may usher in as many diplomatic catastrophes as breakthroughs. (In June, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst claimed to have given 260,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, a Web site dedicated to publishing confidential material.) When I asked Cohen whether sites like Wikileaks made the kind of diplomacy he advocates harder, he allowed that they posed a challenge: “All of these tools can be utilized by individuals for everything from Wikileaks to other negative purposes” — at least as the State Department sees it — “but that technology isn’t going anywhere. So we can fear we can’t control it and ignore the space, or we can recognize we can’t control it, but we can influence it.”

real dangers when companies are conflated with states. “The risk,” Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told me in February, “is if and when in a particular country — whether that’s China or Iran or Cuba or North Korea — there’s a perception that Twitter or Facebook is a tool of the U.S. government

It is crucial to how Cohen and Ross see themselves: equal parts barnstormers and brainstormers, creating and sustaining networks of networks. Ross and Cohen share all their contacts and remain in touch constantly, though they’re often on opposite sides of the globe. (“Jared and I divide and conquer,” Ross says.) Their closeness might come as something of a surprise: Cohen was appointed by Condoleezza Rice and still considers her a mentor; Ross was deeply embedded in the Obama campaign. And they pursued very different paths to the State Department.

It is crucial to how Cohen and Ross see themselves: equal parts barnstormers and brainstormers, creating and sustaining networks of networks. Ross and Cohen share all their contacts and remain in touch constantly, though they’re often on opposite sides of the globe. (“Jared and I divide and conquer,” Ross says.) Their closeness might come as something of a surprise: Cohen was appointed by Condoleezza Rice and still considers her a mentor; Ross was deeply embedded in the Obama campaign. And they pursued very different paths to the State Department.

It is crucial to how Cohen and Ross see themselves: equal parts barnstormers and brainstormers, creating and sustaining networks of networks. Ross and Cohen share all their contacts and remain in touch constantly, though they’re often on opposite sides of the globe. (“Jared and I divide and conquer,” Ross says.) Their closeness might come as something of a surprise: Cohen was appointed by Condoleezza Rice and still considers her a mentor; Ross was deeply embedded in the Obama campaign. And they pursued very different paths to the State Department.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/magazine/18web2-0-t.html

( And this is how we start shit on twiter, all over the world)

Mej777 ago

Just seeing the name Paul Kagame should send shivers down everyone’s spine....ruthless genocide in Rwanda

new4now ago

remembered hearing of it, took a quick looky see

Anderson Cooper was down there at the time