Silicon Valley is playing a much larger role in international diplomacy in the Obama administration than in the Bush administration. That’s in large part thanks to Jared Cohen, who has played a role in both.
Cohen joined Condoleezza Rice’s State Department policy planning staff as its youngest member in 2006. A Stanford University graduate who won a Rhodes Scholarship and earned a master’s degree in international relations at Oxford, Cohen advised the State Department on youth and education, particularly in the Muslim world. He gained notice for his book: “Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East,” which was based on his travels there. He advised Rice on how to reach young people in the Middle East who were increasingly using social media tools
Now Cohen is on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team and helped with her speech on Internet freedom. I spoke with him while he was waiting at the airport to board a flight for Moscow. He’s part of an effort that Secretary Clinton calls “21st Century Statecraft.” In January, Clinton held a dinner in Washington to explore how to use technology to promote diplomacy
That’s what Cohen will be doing for the next five days. He has teamed with Howard Solomon of the National Security Council and White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra to lead an all-star U.S. delegation to Russia to see how technology can mutually benefit both countries.
Among the luminaries headed to Russia with Cohen are actor Ashton Kutcher;
EBay CEO John Donahoe
Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman and founder of Social Gaming Network;
Twitter co-founder and Square founder Jack Dorsey;
Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker;
and Cisco System CTO Padmasree Warrior.
They will meet with Russian ministers of health and education, advisors to President Dimitry Medvedev, leaders of technology companies and more. They will tackle issues such as encouraging entrepreneurship and e-government initiatives and combating child trafficking and corruption
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Jared Cohen
an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
he was one of a few staffers that stayed under Hillary Clinton later referenced in an article entitled "Tweeting While Tehran Burns".[5] In this capacity, he focused on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Internet freedom, and fostering opposition in repressive countries.
In the midst of the June 2009 protests in Iran, Cohen sought to support the opposition in Iran. He contacted Twitter, requesting that the company not perform planned maintenance that would have temporarily shut down service in Iran, because the protestors were using Twitter to maintain contact with the outside world. According to The New Yorker Ryan Lizza, “The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference, and White House officials were furious." In an interview with Clinton, she “did not betray any disagreement with the President over Iran policy,” but “cited Cohen’s move with pride.”[19]
The New Digital Age: Re-shaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,[24] co-authored with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, was a New York Times bestseller
Julian Assange wrote critically of the book: “ [It] proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world's people and nations into likenesses of the world's dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal… This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing
In an email addressed to the deputy Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton dated on July 25, 2012, Cohen's revealed that Google Ideas was working on a project, together with Al Jazeera, to track defectors of the Syrian Army with the explicit goal of "encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Cohen